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What does it take to pull off a secret double life? How did Clarence King, the celebrated white explorer, scientist and writer, transform himself into a black Pullman porter named James Todd? In my last blog, I raised some of the issues surrounding his racial masquerade. But King's alternative identity involved a class masquerade, as well. How could an Ivy League-educated scientist from an elite Newport family pass himself off as a working man?

I have tried to imagine how King slipped into the persona of James Todd as he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, leaving his elite midtown Manhattan haunts to join his African American wife and mixed race children in Brooklyn, and later in Queens. Perhaps he slipped into a Pullman porter's coat, or adopted a working class accent (his friends all commented that he was gifted mimic of dialects). Perhaps he emptied his wallet or stashed his nice clothes in the Manhattan hotel where he maintained a quite of rooms. But even so, he would have to remain on guard even after he got home to his wife. Since she did not know his true identity, he would have to lie about where he had been that day, what he had eaten for lunch, what he had done at work. The effort must have been exhausting.

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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.

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Martha A. Sandweiss is our guest blogger during the week of March 2nd. If you have any questions for Martha A. Sandweiss add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is some more information about Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he loved

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.