Multi-Racial Read #15: Dear Senator Part VI

In this sixth part of this series of excerpts from Essie Mae Washington Williams' autobiography, Dear Senator: A Memoir of the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, I bring you some of her segregated world. 

During their first meeting after the birth of Essie Mae's son she recollected,

"...he kept it cool and formal. The most he would do was urge me to go back to school. 'You need that education, Essie Mae, as much as your husband needs his." But that was as close as he would get, like a guidance counselor or the teacher that he was. As much as I wanted to 'belong' to him, I never felt like a daughter, only an accident....Something, some strong feeling, was definitely there. That was what was drawing him to me, and me to him. But that feeling was all bottled up. We both felt it, from opposite sides of an invisible wall. It was segregated love." [p.155]

She and her husband, Julius, lived in Savannah where he tried to start a law practice. She observed, 

"Sometimes the utter complacency of black Savannah would provoke me into action. I was usually very self-effacing. First, I was a woman, who wanted to be a lady, and ladies weren't loud, pushy, or that hated word used by whites, 'uppity.' Second, I was black, or at least assigned to that category, so I felt second class and hence not entitled to speak my piece. Third, I was illegitimate and harbored a shame over my birth that stifled me, despite the fact I knew it wasn't my fault. Finally, I had a big secret to keep, and as the illegitimate daughter of a famous white supremacist, I was under a lifetime gag order." [p.160]

Nevertheless, one day when she was pregnant and coming home from work, she sat in the empty "whites only" section of the city bus. Attempts by the bus driver to make her move were unsuccessful and was pleased with her little victory. 

By 1953, it was obvious that Julius' law practice wasn't prospering. When his sister wrote and told them glowing reports of California, the family decided to move west. After receiving a farewell gift of money from her father she wrote,

"All the money in the world couldn't have bought Julius and our two sons decent accommodations on our trip across the country. We drove across the green and lush Deep South and then Texas, which for all its barren plains, was just like the Deep South as far as blacks were concerned. There were motels all along the highways, but blacks were barred form most of them, nor could we use rest rooms at many of the gas stations, for fear of being victimized by Klan types. There was an informal 'network' of black travelers who had told Julius what rest stops and service areas were 'safe' for us, which often meant a nail-biting long ride in which we often came close to running out of gas before we arrived at a safe harbor.

"...In big cities like New Orleans and Dallas there were 'colored only' motor courts where we could catch up on sleep and bathing, but it was more the Mary and Joseph experience of no room at the inn until we reached New Mexico. There were very few blacks there, and people seemed happy to receive us, to take our money. There were lots of Mexicans, and maybe they thought Julius was one of them. It was smooth sailing all the way across the endless southwestern desert to Los Angeles. The whole trip lasted about a week, but the trials and tribulations of being black voyagers in a white world made it seem like a month." [p. 163-4]

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If you remember, I began this series saying that I read Dear Senator on a recent trip to California. Although apparently Essie Mae's family didn't have problems getting services as they crossed the desert, I couldn't help thinking about them when we drove through barren, southwestern Arizona. Vistas like this were common with water available every few miles for over-heated radiators.  

I was fortunate. I had air-conditioning, a water bottle, and a cell phone. Luxuries not known to the Williams family.

For previous posts in this series please see:
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Next up, we'll hear more of Essie Mae's political observations.

Multi-Racial Read #14: Dear Senator Part V

This is the fifth in a series of excerpts from Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.  

Strom Thurmond secretly visited his daughter throughout her college years. Soon after Thurmond lost his bid for the presidency in 1948 and Essie Mae's mother died, Essie Mae confronted him on some of his pervasive beliefs about blacks. Her boldness was fueled by anger over the miserable conditions of her mother's death. Perhaps she was also tired of the cloak of secrecy which permeated their visits. 

"I want black people to have jobs."

"So do I, Essie Mae. That's why I love this school [South Carolina State University], which gets Negroes qualified. I'm working on a lot of educational reforms... But it takes time."

"The backs of the buses, the railway coaches, the colored balconies at the movie shows... It's not fair."

"It's the South, Essie Mae," the governor spoke with finality. "It's the culture here. It's the custom. It's the way we live." I could tell the "we" didn't include me. "You don't go to England and tell them to get rid of the queen and the royalty. That's not fair, either, but it's the custom. They got rid of the royalty in Russia, and what do you have? Communism! A police state. It's no different from Hitler."

And neither are you, I wanted to say. What I did say was, "Hitler said the Jews were inferior. You said the Negroes (I often used his terms) are inferior."

"That is completely untrue, Essie Mae. A terrible falsehood! Where did I say that?

"Not inferior. Different! Different! Imagine! To compare me to Hitler. Not that I haven't heard it in that campaign. I heard everything. But to hear it from you. Essie Mae... You can't change the South."

"You don't want to, sir."

"Oh yes I do. I'm changing it right now, by having you here, getting a fine education to get you a fine career. There's nothing in this country you won't be able to do, Essie Mae. Nothing at all. Nothing your husband won't be able to do."

"We can't get served at the counter at Woolworth's."

"Why would you want to? The food's no good. I bet these restaurants right here are much better. They serve good fresh food. I know they do. You can't get a vegetable at Woolworth's. I've never seen spinach, green beans at the five and dime. What do you want, a hot dog that will kill you?"

"I guess I want the choice." (p. 146-7)

At the end of that visit Thurmond reached out to hug his daughter, but she didn't recieve it.  But when she was counting the money he gave her after he left she concluded,

"For all his bluster, for all his racist campaign posturing, I somehow couldn't dislike him the way I wanted to...Even though on the surface he had it all, high office, a perfect wife, health and wealth and power, I--and only I--new how deeply conflicted he had to be. I knew he loved my mother. I believed he loved me, after his fashion. It was an unspeakable love, forbidden by the 'culture and custom' of the South, as he called it. The money was speaking it for him. It wasn't hush money; it wasn't a bribe. It was the governor's own outpouring of love and shame and frustration. He had no other way to demonstrate his affection." (p. 149)

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Next week I'll share more of Essie Mae's observations about segregation. 

For previous posts in this series:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Multi-Racial Read #13: Dear Senator- Part IV

When Strom Thurmond assumed the gubernatorial office in January 1947, Essie Mae was one of a select group of students from South Carolina State University who attended. As she looked at the family who surround him she thought,

I wanted to be up there on the podium with them. This was my family, but I didn't know them and they didn't know me. In time, in time, I prayed to myself. If my father could change this state, with its Confederate flags flying and its Confederate soldiers standing vigil atop their obelisks, I had reason to hope he could change his own house. I flattered myself by thinking that my own existence might have something to do with his progressive stance. (p. 120)

[Note: At that time Thurmond was more sympathetic to blacks. But he changed his position in later years.]

Her father visited her at college, although the meetings were always secretive. 

His favorite question, which he asked whenever he saw me, was "How does it feel to be the daughter of the governor?" My answer was always the same: "It doesn't bother me at all." I was trying to joke with him, but he took it with a stone face. To him, I suppose our deep secret wasn't a joking matter. Still, this was the first time he himself had verbally acknowledged that I was his child. He used the D-word,  which he had not done in our previous meetings. (p. 123-4)

Hardly a year later and shortly after Thurmond's marriage to a pretty aide who was less than half his age, the Governor returned to his family-ingrained prejudices against the black race. In response to President Truman's address to Congress on civil rights, Thurmond vowed that South Carolina was "ready to fight back," denounced Truman's civil rights measures as "anti-American," and  defended segregation laws as "essential to the racial protection and purity of the white and Negro races alike." (p.133-4)

Essie Mae felt as if, "...my mother and I, and the blacks of South Carolina, had been stabbed in the back.  That summer, she had "too much rage to seek company for my misery. I wanted to forget."

So, she got married to a man who had been pursuing her for years, Julius Williams. Not wanting to hurt him in anyway and concerned over how he would react to her white parentage, she kept her father's identity a secret.

"I kept my history, and my anger, to myself." (p. 135)

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Next week I'll share a conversation when she finally expresses some of that anger. 

For previous posts in this series:


Part I
Part II
Part III

And the Winner is...

Congratulations to Gail Hurlburt, who persevered and WON an autographed copy of Chris Woodworth's book, Ivy in the Shadows.

For those of you who didn't win, don't despair! Next May I will give away my last copy of this book as a part of the Friendship issue of Talking Story. If you don't receive this bi-monthly newsletter which Joyce Hostetter and I publish, sign up today!

Gail, please send me your mailing address and I'll put the book in the mail to you shortly. Thanks to all for entering!

Ivy in the Shadows and a Giveaway!

I'm interrupting my mini-series on Dear Senator since I just finished reading Ivy in the Shadows by Chris Woodworth and have another copy to give away. 

Upper elementary and middle school girl readers will enjoy this true-to-life story of a 12-year-old girl.  Ivy is learning how to deal with her mother's failed marriages, assuming more responsibility for her younger brother J.J, navigating the waters of changed school friendships, and figuring out Caleb, the boarder her mother takes in to help make ends meet. 

Like many children in families, Ivy learns about life by eavesdropping. She listens to her mother's discussions with her best friend, "Aunt" Maureen and finds out about their love lives and about her step-father. But eavesdropping only works some of the time. When she incorrectly pieces together the information she hears Caleb telling J.J., her faulty conclusions lead her down the wrong path. 

I appreciate how Chris Woodworth portrays a young girl trying to figure out who is telling the truth, who to trust, and how appearances aren't always what they seem to be. There are strong messages on the importance of honesty, facing the consequences of false assumptions, admitting when one is wrong, and the characteristics of a true friend. 

I also loved Ivy's voice, which you get to hear right from the opening paragraph:

Some say you get your best education in school. Others say it's through life. I got my best education early on eavesdropping at Mama's feet while she talked to my aunt on the telephone. (p. 1)

Thanks to Joy Peskin, Chris's editor, of Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, I am giving away an autographed copy of Ivy in the Shadows. So, for those of you who didn't win a copy back in February when I posted the backstory about this book, here's another chance!

Here are the giveaway rules:

• Post this blog on your social media site of choice OR become a new follower of this blog. 
• Either way, leave a comment with your email address (if you are new to my blog) with what you did.
• I will draw a winner's name on Monday morning, June 3. 

Thanks for entering!

Multi-Racial Read #12: Dear Senator- Part III

In the previous posts in this series, I shared excerpts from Dear Senator: A Memoir of the Daughter of Strom Thurmond that covered Essie Mae's early years. This post includes some of her struggles with her racial identity. 

During her nursing training at Harlem Hospital Essie Mae attended Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.'s church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church. She admired the fact that he was "so light skinned that it was always said he could have 'passed for white.' Perhaps the most inspiring thing about him what that he didn't want to. (p. 85) She reflected,

A lot of girls, the light-skinned ones, frequently talked about passing, marrying into the white world, preferably the rich white world, and living on East Street- Park Avenue, not Lenox. Here I was, born into the rich, white world, the plantation world, and yet where was I? It could have been easy to be resentful, because I was "it" or at least half of "it," yet it was doing me no good aside from two envelopes of money. I was grateful to have a church to turn to, to count my blessings and pray for more, and to watch this great "white" preacher embrace his blackness. If he could be happy with it, so could anyone else. (p. 85)

Essie Mae decided nursing wasn't for her and discussed her options when Strom visited after the war was over. She was pleased when he suggested she attend the "state" college back home in South Carolina until she realized that he meant the "Negro college."  

He didn't have the heart to say the word. In face, he had never spoken the word in my presence He couldn't bring himself to do it, but there it was. My father saw me as a Negro. I may have been half black and half white, but the rule in the courts was a drop of blood made you black. I don't know what else I was expecting. I had lived my whole life as a Negro, but to hear it from my white father, and a judge at that, made it a brutal ruling, and one with no appeal. I could either go to a "Yankee" college or a "Negro" college, but I couldn't go to a "Southern" college, because that meant a white college, and despite my white father, I couldn't be white. p.97"

Next week I'll share Essie Mae's thoughts on her father as South Carolina's 103rd governor and its effect on her. Here are links to the previous posts:

Part I
Part II

Multi-Racial Read #11: Dear Senator Part II

Last week, in my first blog about Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, I shared highlights of Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ early years and the revelation of her parentage.  This second  post includes some of Essie Mae’s teenage and early adult recollections.

Meeting her father for the first time changed Essie Mae. Always a good student, she tried to use her academic abilities to gain white friends. She wrote,

Knowing that I had a white father somehow emboldened me to do things I would never have done before. 

In particular, one time in high school she was caught allowing Gloria- a pretty blond cheerleader who all the boys liked—to cheat off her paper.  When the teacher reprimanded her, she “lectured me about everybody having to stand on her own feet, that if I could stand so nicely on mine, so could Gloria. The implication was that if a poor black girl could do well in math, it should be a piece of cake for the school’s white princess. The idea that Gloria needed “Negro” assistance was beneath her and the school’s dignity. I hung my head and apologized…Gloria never did speak to me one way or the other. P.47

When World War II broke out, Essie Mae learned from Carrie that her father had volunteered.  Her mother explained,

He’s an Edgefield man,” she said proudly. “They need to fight. It’s in their blood. His grandfather was right beside Robert E. Lee when he surrendered. War runs in the family.”

But is it really “our” family? I wanted to ask her. Talk about being the poor relations. We were the invisible relations.

…..

As Coatesville hunkered down for war, I tried my hardest to put Strom Thurmond out of my mind. Yet like a moth to a flame, I couldn’t stop reading about South Carolina and the “Gone with the Wind” world that was at least half my birthright, but it was a birthright I could not claim. I wanted to find out the worst about this forbidden family, so that I could hate them and want nothing to do with them. After all, did they not formerly own slaves? …And what was my father up to? What kind of justice to blacks did he dispense? (p. 56)

These conflicts and questions would haunt Essie Mae for her entire life.

After a brief meeting in a Philadelphia hotel room while Strom was on leave, he shook her hand and saw her and Mary (her aunt) to the door.

“Is he ashamed of me?” I asked Mary when were out in the street.

“Ashamed?” She opened the envelope and counted 200 dollars in twenties, just as before. “Do you call this ashamed?’

Two hundred dollars was indeed a lot of money, but spread out over three years, it wasn’t that much. Wasn’t a daughter worth more than that? “That doesn’t mean he cares about me,” I said.

“It does to me. It does indeed,” Mary said. (p. 73)

This pattern of secret meetings and money gifts continued long into Essie Mae’s adulthood. Although later in life family members would say these payments were “shush” money, Essie Mae came to believe that the money was expressions of his love for her and her mother—although it always hurt that he never publically acknowledged her as his daughter.

After high school, Essie Mae decided to pursue nursing.  She only considered black programs thinking,

It didn’t occur to me to apply to a program for one of the great university hospitals….though I might have been qualified to get in. I guess I “knew my place,” my white father notwithstanding. There were talented blacks at all these institutions, but I was too locked into the self-perception of race limitation to try to test the color lines. I was shy and self-effacing and had never been away from home…Penetrating the white universe was far too intimidating a prospect. If my own white father didn’t want me, why would anyone else? (p. 74-5)