- #The strange story of a guy next door and a novelist chapter 14 skin
- #The strange story of a guy next door and a novelist chapter 14 free
Paradoxically, Sandweiss says, "those laws meant to 'fix race' made racial designations extremely fluid.
#The strange story of a guy next door and a novelist chapter 14 skin
Some Southern states came up with various "solutions." Among other things, Sandweiss notes, they passed race laws - laws that said, effectively, "If one of your eight great-grandparents is black, you are black, no matter what your skin looks like."
"How could you recognize a black person if they were no longer an enslaved person?"
#The strange story of a guy next door and a novelist chapter 14 free
"Once enslaved people became free people, many Southerners became very anxious about how they could keep black people in their place, so to speak," Sandweiss explains. had to recast some of the ways it thought about questions of race and identity. In the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly, the U.S. Sandweiss' book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why King chose to live a double life - and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. "He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America."įamously connected, too: "Two of his closest friends were Henry Adams - the grandson and great-grandson of presidents - and John Hay, who had been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and would become the secretary of state." "James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd," author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time - a Pullman porter. Geological Survey Photographic LibraryĪda Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s.
Scientist and scholar Clarence King is at the center of a singular and striking story from American history - one that author Martha Sandweiss says illustrates just how fluid and complicated our ideas about race really are.