Clarence King (1842-1901) was a distinguished geologist, famous as the leader of an exploration of the 40th parallel, “the man who mapped the West,” the first director of the U. S. Geological Survey. A son of Newport society (he is buried in Island Cemetery), he returned from his frequent rambles around the continent to lodgings in private clubs and residential hotels in New York City, where he charmed a wide circle of admirers and led the high life of a celebrity. With his intimate friends, John Hay and Henry Adams and their spouses, he bonded to form the Five of Hearts, and he wrote a classic account of mountaineering in California that earned him a reputation as a man of letters.

Ada Copeland (1860-1964), born a slave in western Georgia, emigrated to New York circa 1884 and took a job as a nursemaid in the downtown home of a white family. At some point, under unknown circumstances, the black domestic worker and the celebrated white scientist met and fell in love.

King had long lauded the attraction of dark-skinned women to his friends. But he knew that his relationship with Copeland would destroy his career and alienate his family if it became known. So he adopted an alternate persona. Presenting himself as James Todd, a black Pullman porter from Baltimore, he wed Ada in 1888. Todd installed his wife in a succession of homes in Brooklyn and Queens, far from King’s Manhattan haunts, and the couple had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

As the years passed, Todd changed his story, telling his wife he was a traveling steelworker of West Indian birth. But he didn’t reveal his true identity to her until he lay dying of tuberculosis in far-off Arizona. The widow Todd and her children, supported by funds presumably left by her husband, eventually took the King name and in 1933 engaged in a legal battle that revealed the sensational story to the public.

Martha A. Sandweiss, a history professor at Princeton, faced an immense obstacle in researching the story of this long-secret couple: while Clarence King is extremely well-documented, sources are pitifully few for Ada Copeland and James Todd. Sandweiss overcame the dilemma the best way she could — by presenting lucid pictures of the events and situations the couple faced, and intuiting the two into the scenes with qualifiers aplenty. Her tale of interracial love and a double life of deceit alternately entertains, fascinates, perplexes and saddens.

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