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Title details for Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss - Available

Passing Strange

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

by Martha A. Sandweiss
Lorna Raver
Audiobook
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Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King was named by John Hay "the best and brightest of his generation." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada King, only on his deathbed.


Martha A. Sandweiss, a noted historian of the American West, is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American "race," an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children. Passing Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the "Todd's" wedding in 1888 to the 1964 death of Ada, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery, and finally to the legacy inherited by Clarence King's granddaughter, who married a white man and adopted a white child in order to spare her family the legacies of racism.


A remarkable feat of research and reporting spanning the Civil War to the civil rights era, Passing Strange tells a uniquely American story of self-invention, love, deception, and race.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 10, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400191512
      • File size: 409240 KB
      • Duration: 14:12:34

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      It reads like fiction, but it isn't. At the end of the nineteenth century, Clarence King led a double life. To his mother and friends, like statesman John Hay and author Henry Adams, he was a well-known geologist who helped map the American West. To his African-American wife, Ada, he was James Todd, a Pullman porter and the father of her five children. Lorna Raver reads with enthusiasm and a deliberate delivery. There isn't much opportunity for characterizations as Ada and Clarence/James don't speak, but Raver makes sure you don't miss a word of this well-researched story. At the end of his life Clarence/James confessed to Ada, and his friends took care of her. A feel-good story well presented. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 1, 2008
      Sandweiss (Print the Legend
      ) serves a delicious brew of public accomplishment and domestic intrigue in this dual biography of the geologist-explorer Clarence King (1842–1901) and Ada Copeland (c. 1861–1964), a “black, working-class woman” who was “born a slave.” Rendered as fiction, this true tale, would seem quite implausible—“a model son of Newport and one of the most admired scientists in America,” Clarence kept secret for 13 years his marriage to Ada and their apparently contented domestic life. He kept his patrician past and celebrated present concealed as well from his wife, who believed herself the wife of James Todd, a black Pullman porter. Sandweiss provides a fascinating account of King's “extraordinary double life as an eminent white scientist and a black workingman”; Ada's struggle “through the legal system to assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial history, and claim the trust fund she believed to be hers”; and rich insights into the “distinctive American ideas about race” that allowed King to “pass the other way across the color line, claiming African ancestry when he had none at all.”

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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