I’ve just finished reading Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, historian Martha A. Sandweiss’ take on the secret marriage of Clarence King, geologist, explorer and author to Ada Copeland, a domestic worker who had been born a slave. The fact of the marriage had been public knowledge since the 1930s, but Sandweiss has built a remarkable book around around it that ties together stories of race and class, economic and social change, adventure and love. Sandweiss discovered that King “passed” as a black man when he met Copeland, and kept from her the secret of his name and his identity as one of the most celebrated men of his day. She found out only in a letter he had written her from his deathbed. The book explores the complexity of this relationship and the question of how King could pull this deception off for more than a decade. More than a microstudy, it is also an extraordinarily rich portrayal of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and would, I think be a splendid read for an undergraduate course. Sandweiss sums it all up in the final paragraph of the book.
The story of Clarence and Ada King is about love and longing that transcend the historical bounds of time and place. . . . But it is also a peculiarly American story that could take root only in a society where one’s racial identity determined one’s legal rights and social opportunities. At every turn it exposes the deep fissures of race and class that cut through the landscape of American life. . . .
Passing Strange is in the library at Call Number: E 185.625 .S255 2009