Book #31

Martha Sandwieiss's Passing Strange sounds SO good! It is the true story of a white man living in New York in the late 1800s, going to hoity-toity clubs and fraternizing with movers and shakers. He's a well known and well respected geologist and writer. And he's got Jungle Fever. In his geologically oriented travels around the world, Clarence King decides that dark-skinned women are more natural and real, and they're the only ones who really attract him. But in Manhattan in those days, racial intermingling simply was not done.

So he starts sneaking out at night, frequenting black clubs and listening to black music. Did you know that many white men did so at that time, in the U.S. and in Europe? They'd leave all their identification at home in case they "got caught" and prowl around black neighborhoods, seeing what was going on in what they thought of as a more "real" world -- one with less artifice.

But that's not enough. Clarence King met Ada Copeland, a black former slave, and he gave her a fake name and identity: James Todd, black Pullman porter. And he married her and they had a bunch of kids! And he pretended for 13 years to be black! And he never told his friends (and certainly not his mother) that he was married! He lived a double life right in the same city.

Now, you can get most of that information off the book cover, so don't think I ruined it for you.

What a great story! Unfortunately, neither Ada nor Clarence/James left any diaries, letters, or other evidence about their thoughts or feelings toward each other. The story must therefore be told with a lot of, "we must suppose that..." and "it can be assumed that..." which is damn boring. Sandweiss also using an academic voice throughout, which reinforces the boredom. I think I would have rather read a fictionalized version of the story.



Here's a great line from one of King's letters to his friend, "You have always thought my alleged savagery of soul a mere attitudinizing but you were wrong." Try to use that somehow in your own life!