Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss Read Free Book Online

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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
     
     
Copyright © Martha A. Sandweiss, 2009
    All rights reserved
     

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     

Sandweiss, Martha A.
Passing strange : a Gilded Age tale of love and deception across
the color line / Martha A. Sandweiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
    eISBN : 978-1-440-68615-3

     
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FOR MY PARENTS

Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less?
    —Philip Roth, The Human Stain

PROLOGUE
    An Invented Life
    EDWARD V. BROWN, THE CENSUS TAKER, MOVED SLOWLY DOWN North Prince Street, knocking on each and every door in this Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York. It was June 5, 1900, a mild and sunny day in the first spring of a new century. And as federal census agents had done once a decade for more than a hundred years, he was counting Americans, compiling a mosaic portrait of the nation. Who lives here, he asked at each residence, and what is the occupants’ “color of skin,” their sex, their marital status, their age? For each of the inhabitants he recorded a birthplace, as well as the birthplaces of their parents, and for the foreign-born he noted when they had emigrated and whether they were citizens of the United States. He wrote down everyone’s occupation, asked whether he or she could read and write, and separated the renters and boarders from the home owners. In his careful, neat hand, Brown dutifully recorded the data on the preprinted census sheets that would eventually find their way to Washington, D.C., and become part of the official twelfth census of the United States. Queens, that census would show, was much like the more densely settled community of Brooklyn, just to the west: it was overwhelmingly white, about 98 percent, with close to a quarter of those white residents foreign born. 1
    As Brown made his way down North Prince Street, he encountered immigrants from Germany, England, Ireland, and Poland, families supported by men who worked as policemen, machinists, and clerks. At number 50, he met Mary Chase,