Free at Last:
The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out,
but she still doesn't
have full control over her story
by Audrey T. McCluskey
Bloomington Herald-Times
February 15, 2004
Courtesy of: BFC/A
After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt "completely free." Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one.
Thurmond's deceit was finally confirmed by a persistent white woman reporter who, in the recently signed movie deal, becomes the hard-nosed reporter in whose voice the story is told. This once again marginalizes Washington-Williams and Carrie Butler who died silent and poor of kidney disease before reaching her 40th birthday. The news media in soft pedaling the seamy side of this story, and Hollywood's plans to appropriate it, obscure history in search of simplistic happy endings occasioned by white intervention. (Remember Mississippi Burning; A Long Walk Home; A Dry White Season; Glory, Cry Freedom, Amistad and other films that posit a white hero at the center of a black story?)
This preempts an examination of the recurring narrative of race, sex, and power in our society, especially from the perspective of those trampled upon. Poignant examples includes Sally Hemings, a 13-year-old slave in Thomas Jefferson's household and the unacknowledged half sister of his deceased wife, Martha. She reportedly bore Jefferson four children yet was never freed by him. That gash in the armor of a founding father has produced acrimony that still rages today in some quarters — without ever imagining Hemings' voice. Hemings — like Butler — took her story to the grave.
History was obscured when Harriet Jacobs, a slave, hid for seven years in a narrow crawl space to escape the sexual demands of her master, had her name left off the first published account that she wrote of her life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Instead, the names of a prominent white abolitionist, L. Maria Child, appeared on the cover as the editor. Neither the sexual treachery Jacobs finally escaped or the cooptation of her story was unusual.
After Emancipation and Reconstruction, black women like Carrie Butler had limited options for employment. Many worked for $3 a week in white homes or did laundry for 75 cents a load, writes historian Deborah Gray White. Their dim prospects meant working in the fields or kitchens of their former owners exposing themselves to all manner of exploitation and rape. Families who could find schooling for their children often favored their daughters, hoping for them to become teachers or nurses, the professional alternatives opened to black women. With encouragement from their families, who could not protect them, black women were among the first groups to migrate to Northern cities.
Being sexually vulnerable to white men affected the psyche of black women. Historian Darlene Clark Hine explains that black women, especially those with education and devoted to race uplift, developed a "culture of dissemblance" that kept them mute about their sex lives. They downplayed sexual victimization and the stigma it caused by focusing on empowerment through education and community work.
It is not surprising that Carrie Butler never talked to her daughter about her relationship with Thurmond, whom Washington Williams first met at age 16 and discovered was white upon entering the back door of his office. "There was no advantage in it," Washington Williams replied when asked why she did not expose Thurmond. There would have been social and economic consequences for mother and daughter. Butler did help her daughter escape North, like the generation before her. Perhaps before she died, she also bargained with Strom to have her educated.
Some may argue that if the retired teacher had spoken up 50 years ago, Thurmond's segregationist shell game would have been exposed much earlier — hastening the Civil Rights Revolution. But her delayed candor should be viewed as part of a complex history of race constructed through gendered power relationships that have conspired to keep victimized black women silent and marginalized.
Still — the secrets, lies, and silences from which Williams now declares herself free do not seem to include the freedom to control her own story.
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