Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss

Author:Martha A. Sandweiss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SOMETIME AROUND M AY DAY, King took the train from Washington back to New York, caught a local train to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and transferred to the elevated line that would carry him out to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. King’s “Cuban dream” was over. 60 After more than three months, James Todd was home. The children must have looked at him with shy curiosity, Ada with relief. She would not have heard from her husband. No matter how anxious he felt about her welfare, James Todd the Pullman porter could not send his wife a letter postmarked on a distant island. Not even Mr. Pullman’s vast empire extended that far.

“How hard and cold and hateful the whole face of New York is with its veneered parvenues, and its ebb and flow of vulgar, clumsy, jostling peasantry,” Clarence King wrote to Adams from the Century Association after being back in the city for less than two weeks. He would rather be a stowaway in the hold of a southbound steamer “than dwell in the tents of the Metropolitan Club.” He tried his best, he told Adams. “I drivel away like all the rut and the optimistic lie rolls from my sinful tongue in oily stream.” Next week, he would even go to the country home of his old friend, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, “to pass some days amidst marble, truffles, tapestry and nasal commonplace and I am going to be breezy and effective and talk like a genuine ‘American’ and be truly popular.” It would make you sick, he told Adams.61

Every midtown dinner party seemed to demand of King a kind of painful charade. “I shall go to the Metropolitan Club,” he wrote Hay, “and make myself beloved of all the stable boys whom fate has raised to the nth power and chum with all the huxsters manquée and carry off the role of a good sensible American bourgeois cad, to the Queen’s taste.” His intense dislike for “things New Yorkan” had driven him into isolation, and to make a living he would have to crawl out. He “would go back into this hated thing called society and make myself as popular and commonplace and like the average as I can (and I know I can do it) till I get some of the dollars them fellers are in and then!!! Then my beloved tropical islands!!! ”62

King despised the infernal struggle for money. Like his friends, he wondered how someone with his talents could be so bad at making it. To Hay, whose financial generosity kept him afloat, he vowed to try harder, by suppressing his natural inclinations and adopting the cutthroat tactics of the self-made millionaires he viewed with such scorn. “No matter how much I hate the people and the life no one shall see it or know it. I am going in not as a skirmishing amateur in the part but as a man who means blood and loves the road that leads to it,” King wrote.

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