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)

Multi-Racial Read #10: Dear Senator Part I

When I packed DearSenator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond in my backpack for a recent trip from Charlotte to Los Angeles, I had no idea that my journey west would replicate one that Essie Mae Washington-Williams took sixty years ago.

But the replication process, although interesting and similar, was one of geography only. My trip wasn’t to find a home that would provide racial equality for my children and myself.

Essie Mae’s was.

But I am beginning in the middle of her story. Using quotes from her autobiography, I plan to share her journey over the course of the next few blog posts. As my faithful blog readers know, I am reading books with a multi-racial theme to provide authenticity to my work in progress, Half-Truths. If you are interested, previous books reviews can be found at that link.

Essie Mae grew up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, a small steel town forty miles west of Philadelphia. As 12 she accepted Christ and remembered,

The Bible was all white, but so were the movies. I loved them both. The whiteness I just accepted, just like a lot of other things. Acceptance was our way of life, as there didn’t seem to be much point, or hope, of trying to change the system. p. 7

Soon after, her life was inalterably changed. A dark-skinned beautiful woman (Carrie) came to visit and announced that she was Essie Mae’s mother.  It turned out that Mary, the woman who had raised her, was really her aunt. Carrie left before Essie Mae could ask who her father was.

She found out several years later.

Accompanied by Mary and Carrie, Essie Mae travelled to Edgefield, South Carolina for a funeral. Days later, Mary dressed her up and took her to meet her father- a rich white lawyer named Strom Thurmond. After an hour filled with Thurmond’s history lectures and admonitions that Essie Mae “study hard,” Thurmond told Carrie:

“You have a lovely daughter.” It was a kind thought, but inside it hurt me. I would have liked to have heard him say, “We have a lovely daughter.”… He never called my mother by her first name.  He didn’t verbally acknowledge that I was his child…It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father.” p. 39

That first meeting foreshadowed Thurmond’s sincere interest in Essie Mae as well as her unquenchable desire to be acknowledged as his daughter.  After the meeting, Essie Mae learned the story of her parents’ encounter at young Strom’s home.  He was 23, home from Clemson University and teaching high school. She was a fifteen-year-old domestic who he and his brothers flirted with. Carrie’s explanation of “How did it happen?” was short and to the point: “Love finds a way, darling.”

Although Carrie felt as if Strom loved her, the deep racism of the Jim Crow South along with his family’s prominence, dictated that they keep their relationship a secret. Essie Mae deduced that her parents continued to find time and ways to be together, but as she grew up, he chose to visit her apart from her mother.

Like other teenagers, Essie Mae’s adolescence was filled with identity issues, but hers was compounded by the ups and downs of her mixed-race parentage.

In my darkest hours I began to look at all black people as victims and white people as oppressors, and everything in America struck me as grossly unfair. In my brightest hours I began to look at myself as someone very special, an amalgam of all that was great about America. I had a brilliant white father and a beautiful black mother; was I not the golden child? Alas, the real Essie Mae fell somewhere between these two poles. I was too humble to be conceited, to meek to be a firebrand. My mantra was “accept,” and accept I did at least outwardly. Yet inside me was pure turbulence. (p.45)

Next week I'll continue to highlight Essie Mae's life journey.