Part One: Clarence King and Ada Copeland

1. Becoming Clarence King
2. King of the West
3. Becoming Ada Copeland
4. King of the City

Part Two: James and Ada Todd

5. New Beginnings
6. Family Lives
7. Breakdowns
8. Endings

Part Three: Ada King

9. On Her Own
10. The Trial

Epilogue: Secrets

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
“One of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divide—in reverse.

Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian Sandweiss (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen: Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), he went through life ‘tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world.’ When King returned from his globetrotting expeditions and settled down in New York to enjoy his fame as the bestselling author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, he embarked on a romance with an African-American woman named Ada Copeland. A young nursemaid who moved north from Georgia in the mid-1880s, she apparently met King sometime in 1887 or early 1888 while he was out ‘slumming.’ That word, the author explains, denoted a class-crossing ‘fashionable amusement,’ according to the Saturday Evening Post. King was serious about his courtship of Copeland, but it was fraught with peril for all concerned, presenting threatening possibilities for blackmail on the one hand and abandonment on the other. He decided to present himself to her as a Pullman porter named James Todd, an invented identity that ‘hinged not just on one lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions.’ As Sandweiss notes in this sturdy work, which blends elements of social and intellectual history with biography, thousands of light-skinned blacks in that era tried to pass for white, but the number of those who did the opposite must have been tiny. Yet King married Copeland and gave up his cherished social privileges. She had borne him five children, and he was on his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told her the truth.

An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faith—and also, as Sandweiss observes, ‘love and longing that transcends the historical bounds of time and place.’”
—Kirkus Reviews

“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 [unsuccessfully] 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.’ A remarkable feat of research and reporting that covers the long century from Civil War to Civil Rights, Passing Strange tells a uniquely American story of self- invention, love, deception and race.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review Feb.)

“Passing Strange tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations… A fine, mesmerizing account.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“[Sandweiss is] a curious, talented writer… she tells [Clarence King’s story] with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve… A sophisticated work of scholarship.”
—Columbia Journalism Review

“Elaborate and incredible… Remarkable.”
—Bookpage

“Sandweiss serves a delicious brew of public accomplishment and domestic intrigue… Fascinating.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“One of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divide—in reverse. As Sandweiss notes in this sturdy work, which blends elements of social and intellectual history with biography, thousands of light-skinned blacks in that era tried to pass for white, but the number of those who did the opposite must have been tiny. An intriguing look at long-held secrets.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Although Passing Strange reads like a suspenseful novel, it introduces us to a real American hero who lived a fascinating life on both sides of the color line. Sandweiss gives us a great lesson in American history that spans three generations.” —Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class

“Passing Strange combines remarkable detective work, riveting storytelling, and the enduring question of race to fashion a most unusual but very American family saga about a famous white man and a heretofore unknown black woman. This book is a stunning achievement and example of just how deeply race is woven into our history, our imaginations, and our lives. Ada Copeland, who became a Todd, and then a King, rescued from obscurity by a talented historian, steals the show.”
—David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation

“Passing Strange is a masterful work of scholarship, and a deeply moving human story well told. Here is a riveting new narrative about a hidden history of American race relations, one filled with love, deception and utmost tragedy on both sides of the color line.”
—Neil Henry, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley, author of Pearl's Secret

“Passing Strange is an irresistible story of love and deception beautifully told. But it is also a major contribution to our understanding of race, class, and gender. This biography of a secret interracial marriage also tells more about the social experience of big city life—New York in this case—than a shelf full of urban histories.”
—Thomas Bender, New York University, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

“This is a wonderfully intelligent and haunting book about love and race and secrets and revelations. The secrets were personal, and closely guarded. In showing how and why they remained secret, Marni Sandweiss reveals much about the American past and the American present.”
—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

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