DEAR SENATOR
A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond
By Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem
Regan Books. 240 pp. $24.95
Essie Mae Washington-Williams never publicly acknowledged that she was Strom Thurmond's out-of-wedlock, mixed-race daughter until several months after the death of the South Carolina senator in 2003. It was a show of filial piety toward a man who had spent much of his career as a segregationist and white supremacist. Once he was in the grave, however, the news media promptly and doggedly tracked down Washington-Williams, then in her late seventies, and blared her revelatory story. The public lapped it up, savoring the irony of arguably the country's best-known symbol of home-grown apartheid having had a youthful sexual liaison with an African American girl. Didn't we know that an "as told to" memoir would soon follow?
Unfortunately, "Dear Senator" has many problems. Washington-Williams (her married name) has a significant story to tell, but it's told in wretched ways in her memoir. Her collaborator, William Stadiem, a Wall Street lawyer turned Hollywood screenwriter, also co-authored (among other works) the tawdry "Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra" with George Jacobs, the singer's African American butler. Stadiem's attempt to write in what was supposed to be Jacobs's colorful black idiom in that book foretold his awkward appropriation of Washington-Williams's voice in this one, making it difficult to know if we're listening to her or to him.
The skeleton of the story is simple enough. Washington-Williams's biological mother, we learn, was Carrie Butler, who worked in her teens as a maid in the affluent Thurmond family's residence. Her liaisons with the future senator began when Strom was 22 and Carrie 15; that, at least, was when she became pregnant with Essie Mae. We're led to assume that their sexual relations were consensual, and "Dear Senator" never raises the question of whether these encounters constituted statutory rape.
Their child was born in the early 1920s. Carrie Butler's married sister, Mary Washington, soon took her new niece to Pennsylvania, where she raised Essie Mae as her own. Mary and her husband divorced while Essie Mae was young, thereby costing her the only father she had known. When the girl was 13, her aunt introduced her to Butler, who revealed that she was her birth mother. The vulnerable child tried to spend as much time as possible with her pretty mother. A few years later, Butler took Essie Mae for a visit to South Carolina, where she arranged a life-altering meeting with Thurmond, who was still a bachelor. "Dear Senator" argues that Essie Mae, yearning for a father to love and be loved by, was most surprised to learn that her "real" father was a white man -- and, she now insists, a virile and handsome one at that.
This is all pretty gauzy stuff. "Dear Senator" shows no concern about Thurmond's inappropriate, abusive appropriation of a vulnerable young household servant; instead, it offers only the hearts-and-flowers version of the story. (The corner of each page is adorned with a curlicued ribbon, lest readers have any doubt that this memoir should be read as a romance novel.)
The body of Washington-Williams's story recounts her long relationship with Thurmond, spanning 60 years of his career as a lawyer, governor and senator. Their father-daughter interactions, and Washington-Williams's interpretations thereof, are almost embarrassing to read about. She's awed by Thurmond, but not so awed that she refuses his money, which is doled out in unmarked envelopes delivered by either the man himself or his anonymous minions. Their brief annual meetings throughout her school years (he arranges to have her attend a segregated South Carolina college), married life and motherhood seem to have been known to many, but they were rarely spoken of, either inside or outside the Thurmond family. Washington-Williams continued to rendezvous with Thurmond -- and to receive what can only be considered hush money during his marathon decades in the Senate, until a few years before his death.
As described here, the complex dynamics of their interactions are uncomfortable at best, ghastly at worst. The senator -- a known health fanatic whose routine seemed to have worked for him, since he lived to be 100 -- often squashed his daughter's hand in his own crunching grip, spoke most often about her health regimen (his advice: exercise, drink lots of water, eat fruits and vegetables, avoid fried food) and almost never mentioned her mother. Washington-Williams fantasizes that Thurmond didn't marry until his mid-forties because her mother had been the great love of his life, whom he was kept from marrying only by society's racial prejudices. These are a naive daughter's pipe dreams.
Through her co-author, Washington-Williams sometimes unconvincingly assumes the voice of a historian, detailing Thurmond's role in establishing the Dixiecrats, running for president against Harry Truman in 1948, then developing the segregationist Southern Manifesto. Thurmond's racist rantings nag at her, but she blithely chalks them up to "politics" and insists, over and over again, that her father was a truly good man who loved her and did what he could (given the temper of the times) for both her and his black constituents.
At the same time, the money kept coming -- never enough to support her fully but always enough to keep her quiet. Washington-Williams, however, maintains that money was never the point. Rather, she argues, she felt a devoted daughter's need to protect her father, his political career and his reputation. We can see in their awkward and distorted dance only a mismatched couple, trapped in an unholy, symbiotic alliance in which they gave and received endless bribes that neither of them could call what they really were.
To be sure, Washington-Williams's story has poignant moments; when she tells Thurmond about her mother's death, for instance, she believes she sees tears in his eyes. She also writes that she once told him how much African Americans hated him, but she expresses little anger here about either his public or private misbehavior.
Moreover, the book's long historical asides seem totally unbelievable, and the extended conversations, going back as far as 60 years, stretch the reader's credulity pretty severely. Can any of us really remember such precise detail about a discussion from last week, much less one from decades past? This device is used to create an aura of authenticity, but it does just the opposite.
Underscoring the clumsiness of this project, "Dear Senator" is filled with personal and newspaper photographs of the rugged Thurmond in his youth and middle age with his pretty white wives and his late-in-life blond children, but the book lacks even one picture of either Washington-Williams's ill-used, ill-fated birth mother or her devoted adoptive mother. How sad! Washington-Williams, Stadiem and their publishers seem to know all too well that the author's "scandalous" familial connection with Thurmond is what counts. That's what will sell books.
What a pity. The shameful story of abusive, manipulative relationships between white men and black women -- throughout the centuries of slavery and after -- should be told often, told well and made available to a wide readership. It's her life, but Washington-Williams and her ghostwriter refuse to tell it honestly.
