The Double Life of Clarence King, by Martha A. Sandweiss

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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.

Several factors enabled King's deceptions. First, there was his alleged profession. By claiming to be a Pullman porter, King not only gave his wife an explanation for his wordliness and his frequent absences from home, he offered a kind of proof of his racial identity. Everyone knew that all of the porters on the Pullman railroad cars were black. If "James Todd" was a porter, he must be a black man. But King could not have pulled this off without the peculiarly American laws that sought to fix racial identity in the United States in the aftermath of Emancipation. In the late nineteenth century, a host of state laws throughout the South declared that individuals with one African American grandparent out of eight could be legally designated as "black," no matter what they looked like. One drop of "black blood" trumped seven drops of white. King took advantage of the laws that made racial identity dependent on heritage - rather than appearance - to claim an African American heritage when he had none at all.

It's ironic. But his very light complexion might thus have become a peculiar sort of proof that he really was a black man. In late nineteenth-century America, a black identity conferred no legal or social privileges at all. Why would anyone who looked like King claim to be a black man unless he truly was?

Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange, The Penguin Press, Penguin Books