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A Secret Daughter Speaks |
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Thurmond's 'secret' child
publishes candid memoir
of TheColumnists.com
“I always thought
I had a fairly normal childhood, until I found out my parents
weren’t who I thought they were.”
That’s the first sentence of Essie Mae Washington-Williams'
new book, “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom
Thurmond.” The first two words of the title refer to the
way she addressed her father in her letters. Her 223-page book,
co-authored byWilliam Stadiem, was published in January.
Already, her story about her life as the biracial illegitimate
daughter of the late South Carolina Senator has triggered national
interest. She has sold rights for a TV movie to CBS. She has
been on TV talk shows and just finished a two-week national book-signing
circuit.
By now, Thurmond’s affair with her mother, Carrie Butler—then
a 15-year-old maid in his family home—is well-known. Washington-Williams,
now 79, kept her relationship to Thurmond a secret until he died
two years ago at age 100.
Convinced it could no longer hurt the career of the onetime champion
of segregation, she publicly disclosed her kinship to him. Regan
Books, a division of HarperCollins, gave her a contract to write
her story.
Her memoir is of interest not only for its details—starting
with her life in a black ghetto in a small Pennsylvania town
where her aunt and uncle raised her—but for what she has
left out.
For instance, she describes her light-skinned mother as “radiant…she
moved and dressed like a fashion model—not that her clothes
were fancy but the way she carried herself.” Yet, her book
has no pictures of her mother (whose identity Washington-Williams
did not learn until she was 13) or even her adoptive mother.
There are six pictures of Thurmond.
She says he supported her—with cash delivered in plain envelopes—but
she doesn’t tell what the grand total was.
She tells about trying to join the Daughters of the American
Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, membership
for which she feels she qualifies through Thurmond’s lineage.
But she doesn’t say if either accepted her. (To be fair,
the book may have gone to press before there was an answer.)
Still, it is fascinating to hear how she followed Thurmond’s
career from afar as he rose from circuit judge to governor to
become the longest-serving senator (48 years) in U.S. history.
She went to his 1947 inauguration as governor with her classmates,
looking on from the crowd as her father went through the ceremony.
His family sat on the dais.
She watched in disappointment as he switched from a progressive
to a hard-line segregationist who bolted from the Democrat’s
1948 convention in protest over Harry Truman’s civil rights
bill. Thurmond became the Dixiecrat candidate for president.
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greets Sen. Strom Thurmond at the White House. Thurmond had been a Democrat, a Dixiecrat and finally a Republican. |
Her world started changing at 17 when she found out who her father was. Her mother brought her to meet him in his law office in his hometown of Edgefield.
At first, she thought he was the black servant in the white coat who opened the door. "I wanted to throw my arms around him. But he just looked at me blankly." Inside, they waited in a room with law books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. When Thurmond entered, she was speechless to see her father was a white man. But that first meeting disapointed her.
Thurmond was courteous. However, she said, he did not act like the person she expected. “He never called my mother by her first name,” Washington-Williams wrote. “He didn’t verbally acknowledge that I was his child. He didn’t ask when I was leaving and didn’t invite me to come back. It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father.”
A few days later, Thurmond's sister delivered a plain envelope with $200 in $10 bills. Those payments kept coming. Most of the time, Thurmond delivered them himself at the end of a visit that would occur about every year.
He sometimes traveled to wherever she was living. Or she would see him in his office in Columbia or Washington. The meetings, she said, usually lasted about an hour. For the most part, they were formal and unemotional. But as he grew older, he began to end them with a hug and then a kiss on the cheek.
Thurmond arranged for her to attend the all-black South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. She appreciated the chance to go to college. But moving to the South meant adapting to a different way of life. The black students rarely left campus. When they did, they sat in the back of buses or the balcony when they went to a movie. They were able to eat only in certain restaurants and shops.
Later, when she married, had four children, and became a teacher in Los Angeles, Thurmond helped get one of her sons a free medical education through the Navy.
Nevertheless, her late husband, Julius, a civil rights lawyer, despised Thurmond. He called his support “bribes” and “hush money.” She told him that Thurmond never asked her to keep their relationship quiet, but they had an unstated understanding.
“It’s not that he swore me to secrecy,” she said. “He never swore me to anything. He trusted me and I respected him. And we loved each other in our deeply repressed way. And that was our social contract.”
Washington-Williams’ great-aunt Calliope, born as a slave, told her that Thurmond’s actions had its roots in Old South tradition. “The massas all looked after their children, no matter who birthed them,” she said. “That was part of what it means to be a gentleman."
Washington-Williams never thought Thurmond’s relationship with her mother was forced on her by his status. Rather, she felt there was a mutual attraction. She wrote that he kept seeing her mother for years after Washington-Williams was born and that “he loved her.”
(Her statement in the book is at odds with a December, 2003, interview with Dan Rather in which she said: “…I understand that after she left and I was born, she didn’t see him anymore after that.”)
Her memoir weaves in a lot of history—telling how Thurmond softened his political stance in later years to become a racial moderate. But because Washington-Williams wrote the book with another person, it is hard to distinguish how much is her contribution and how much her partner wrote.
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Thurmond, wife Nancy Moore Thurmond and their children, from left: Paul, Julie, Nancy Moore, Strom II. Missing: His daughter Essie-Mae, whose mother was a black maid in Thurmond's home. |
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There are also times when she quotes large blocks of dialogue from meetings that took place a half-century ago. Their accuracy strains credulity. But at the same time, they contain some of the most dramatic passages. In one instance, she tells about the time she broke from her usually polite demeanor to challenge him about segregation.
“Do you look at me as a Negro, Senator?”
“I look at you with a lot of pride, Essie Mae,” he said, always knowing how to flatter his way out of a tight corner. This time it wouldn’t work.
“I hate to say this, sir, but do you realize how black people feel about you?” I asked him point blank, amazed at my own boldness.
“I’m dedicated to the improvement of the Negro race….” He was trying to turn this into a campaign speech. I wouldn’t let him.
“Black people hate you. Almost all black people do. They don’t see you as a friend. They see you as the enemy. Their worst enemy. Is that the way you want to be looked at?”
He sat silently, astonished at what I was saying. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t think I was being “uppity.” He was just stunned.
“More and more black people are going to be voting. They want you out of office. Do you want them to turn you out, sir? Because if you don’t, you better change your ways.”
I stood up to go. He stood up. He had the envelope waiting. At first, I refused to take it. He pressed it into my hand. “You’ll need this in California.”
“No thank you, sir.”
“A little spirited debate never hurt anybody, Essie Mae. I’m glad you spoke your mind. I surely speak mine.” He flashed a smile at me, putting the envelope back into my hands. “Now you go back to school, like I’ve been telling you. Just do it.”
And then he hugged me and kissed me good-bye. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
Her memoir is an uneven story, but it is frequently a poignant one--about a troubled woman whose heritage lies unclaimed through no fault of hers. Only in her twilight years has she been able to find it.
“In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was…I may have called it ‘closure’…But it was much more like an opening, a very grand opening.”
©2005 by David Zinman. The Zinman caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The book cover reproduction is courtesy of Harper-Collins books. The other photos are courtesy of the Strom Thurmond Institute picture gallery. This column first posted Feb. 14, 2005.
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