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Passing Strange centers around the story of Clarence King, a celebrated hero of nineteenth-century western history  - a prominent explorer, geologist, writer and public figure - who crossed the color line from white to black to live a secret double life for thirteen years. In 1888 he married a former slave named Ada Copeland. He told her that he was a Pullman porter, that his name was James Todd and, most astonishingly of all, he said that he was a black man. From that moment on, until his death in 1901, King lived in two worlds. By day, he reigned over the Century Association club in midtown Manhattan and hobnobbed with his well-to-do artist friends and political associates. But at night, he would cross the Brooklyn Bridge to join his family in Brooklyn, and later in Queens. His wife and children did not learn his true identity until he confessed from his deathbed.

King's story raises many interesting issues about identity and about what might drive a person to pursue such a demanding and stressful double life. But perhaps the most immediate question it raises is this: How could a man with light sandy-brown hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion persuade his African-American wife and her friends that he was a black man? King descended from a prominent white Newport, Rhode Island family that traced its ancestry back to some of the earliest settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and farther still to several signers of the Magna Carta. He had no African ancestry at all.