Return to a new life

It’s her story now, the story that had spread for decades through rumor, conjecture and snippets of he-said-she-said, and Essie Williams is telling it.

To Dan Rather. To Matt Lauer. To the 250 newspaper reporters and 40 camera crews that showed up for her press conference in Columbia, S.C. To People magazine. To Ebony, which had sent a reporter to track her down during her sophomore year in college, more than 50 years ago, to ask if she knew Strom Thurmond.

“Yes, but just as a friend of the family,” she answered then, and would keep answering, until she finally told the truth -- that the late senator from South Carolina, the late Dixiecrat segregationist, was her father.

Today, between interviews and photo shoots, she’s trying to get back to her life in Los Angeles. But it’s a new life now. She’s recognized at her neighborhood Ralphs. She’s planning on writing a book, which is how all of this got started. And she’s thinking about who might play her in the movie.

It’s Mrs. Williams

Here in Los Angeles, her home of 40 years, she’s much more than Strom Thurmond’s daughter.

Here, she’s known simply by her first and last names, not that mouthful Essie Mae Washington-Williams -- and please call her Mrs.

This is the Mrs. Williams who enjoys a good game of pinochle, who goes to the movies at the Magic Johnson Theatres in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw mall, which is close to her home in View Park, and loves Denzel Washington. She hates to miss Communion Sunday at the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship, where she has worshipped for as long as she has lived here, and where she regularly sees other members of Delta Sigma Theta, a public service sorority, and of the local South Carolina State University alumni chapter, a small group that raises money for scholarships.

Here, she’s the retired adult-school assistant principal, the counselor who encouraged returning dropouts at Fairfax High School, Gardena High School and the Abram Friedman Occupational Center near downtown. The business-ed teacher who was elected union rep because she was always speaking out.

She’s the widow who raised four successful children while working, completing her undergraduate degree at Cal State L.A. and earning a master’s degree in education from USC. She’s the grandmother of 13 and the great-grandmother of four.

At church on first Sunday, her first time back since she made big news, she was swarmed by members of the congregation.

“I’m really proud of you. You bring tears to my eyes,” Anne Dunn said after the service.

Eugenia Boykin took both her hands and said, “I’ve known for years.... “

“I was embarrassed about the situation,” Williams replied, referring to the secret she had kept for most of her 78 years.

Personal questions

She might remind you of your mother, or of other professional black women of her generation. It’s the way they carry themselves: polished, proper, pleasant, reserved, quietly ambitious for themselves and their families.

They were the no-nonsense, strict, socially conservative mothers and neighbors who could silence you with a look. The ones you automatically said yes ma’am to, even if you didn’t know them by name. Intensely private, they shielded their children from hurtful truths, whether it was a white grandparent, a gambler in the family, a womanizing husband, an alcoholic in-law, a child born before marriage, even their age. The emphasis was always on success, always on education. They were always accentuating the positive. You knew better than to ask such a woman a personal question.

“Even when it was rumored around church or wherever, nobody, anywhere, asked me about it,” Williams says. “I guess I wasn’t very approachable.”

And they were stoic. This is a woman who was born at a time when illegitimacy still carried a stigma, when most black parents were married and most black families were intact; who didn’t see her mother from the time she was 6 months old until she was 13; who finally met her father at 16 but couldn’t tell anybody; who dropped out of college after her junior year to marry, then lost her husband when she was 39; who left his home in Savannah and moved her children back to Los Angeles; who found a job and spent three years taking classes part time to finish her bachelor’s degree, then went for a master’s; who never remarried; and who often held two jobs, working at an adult school during the day and teaching at a community college at night.

In an interview at Lady Effie’s Tea Parlor in South Los Angeles, to which she’s brought her lawyer and her oldest daughter, Williams reminisces about high school, her college days, her long career, her life in Los Angeles. Yet she is still reticent when asked about the “situation.”

The rumors

A white man. A famous, some would say infamous, white man. He was 22 when she born. Her mother, black and 16, worked for his family.

Technically that makes Williams, who has a fair complexion, biracial. But don’t call her that or mixed race or, heaven forbid, mulatto, which originated from the word “mule,” a cross between a horse and a donkey.

“I never use any of those terms,” she says. “I grew up black. All of my people are black.”

Well, not all of them. But, as African Americans everywhere can tell you, a white daddy doesn’t make you white if your mama is black.

Despite her birth in the heart of the Confederacy -- in Aiken, S.C., the first state to secede from the union prior to the Civil War and the last to fly the Confederate flag from its state capitol -- Williams says she’s not a Southerner either.

Sent North to live with relatives as a baby, she grew up in Coatsville, Pa., about 30 miles from Philadelphia. “I never really lived in South Carolina,” she says, until her college days.

The rumors started on the campus of South Carolina State, when her father, then the governor, had business with the president and sent for her.

How often did he visit?

Before she can answer, her lawyer, Frank Wheaton, interrupts. “We don’t want to get too certain about the number of visits here, there, wherever.... We want to save something for the book.”

And the movie.

“Are we going to have a movie?” Williams asks him.

Yes, he answers.

Who should play her?

“Vanessa Williams,” she says. “Another person I like -- “

He interrupts, “Halle Berry.”

” -- is Angela Bassett,” she continues.

“But we have to go with what’s real, Mom,” says her daughter, Wanda Terry, referring to skin color. “Halle Berry is in fact mixed.”

“But Vanessa Williams is not,” Wheaton says.

“But in her genes, somewhere,” Terry says.

“If you’re African American,” Wheaton says, “it’s in your genes.”

Protecting herself

She lived a middle-class life with her aunt and uncle, the Washingtons. They didn’t have a lot of money, but there was always enough for everything she needed and expensive extras, like a dress for the prom. In Pennsylvania, she never had to deal with who her biological father was. It became an issue at South Carolina State -- a double embarrassment, because admitting her parentage would have revealed her illegitimate birth and because he was such a powerful and public racist. He didn’t want their relationship known, and neither did she. In her long silence, she’s been criticized for protecting him, but she was also protecting herself.

“I didn’t want people to know he was my father because of his power and his positions on racial segregation, although that did change later. During that period, I didn’t want people to know that,” she explains. “I wasn’t proud of him during that time.”

In 1948, her father was running for president on the Dixiecrat ticket, drawing cheers when he said: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Did she ever feel the need to forgive him?

“I never had anything against him. He was a very helpful person and I liked him very much, so there was no reason to do anything to damage his reputation,” Williams says. “We’ve had discussions about things that had happened. Even when I was in school, there were questions that I had about what was happening ... and I expressed how I felt.”

Wouldn’t revealing his hypocrisy have helped the cause of civil rights?

“Maybe it would have,” she muses, “maybe it wouldn’t have.”

He changed, she reminds those who point to his incendiary past. He was the first Southern senator to hire black staff. He supported extending the Voting Rights Act and creating a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. He always funneled federal funds to black colleges.

He put her through college, for three years, before she dropped out to marry Julius Williams, one of the first graduates of the new law school established at South Carolina State because blacks were barred from the University of South Carolina School of Law. When she lost her husband in 1964 and was raising four children alone, he helped again.

“Well, at that time, I was doing secretarial work. The money wasn’t that great. That’s when that help came,” she says, “and it really did help.”

A famous grandfather

When she heard that he was coming to Los Angeles, she finally told her children.

“I was going to take them to hear Strom Thurmond speak at a church, and I told them to prepare them for that,” she says. “That was the first time they met him.”

Her sons understood the significance, she says. Her oldest, Julius, “kept up with the news.” Her second child, Ronald, then 14, also knew who Thurmond was and remembers meeting “a big man.”

“The girls were younger. Politics didn’t interest them too much,” Williams says.

The youngest, Monica Williams-Hudgens, recalls, “I was about 10. I was not let in on who he was. I was told we were just going to see a friend of hers speak at a church.”

She had been told all of her grandparents were dead. Later, her mother would make sure her daughters knew about the one who wasn’t.

“My mother actually told me who he was when I was 14. I was going through a political awakening during the black power movement and I had really gotten into the slogans, the rhetoric of that period,” Monica says. “My mother decided she wanted to slow my roll just a little bit. She started talking to me about love and forgiveness. She told me who the man was I had met at church. The man who called on the telephone.”

Her older sister, Wanda, was about 16. “I didn’t understand who he was. I didn’t realize the magnitude of this individual,” she says. “You must remember, 16 years old. All I thought about was boys.”

In time, they would tell their own children.

To finally be free

“I’ve been harassed over 60 years from different reporters,” Williams says. And for over 60 years, she wasn’t interested in talking.

After Thurmond’s death in June, the reporters came knocking again. Wanda Terry, the only one of her children who lives in Los Angeles, again urged her mother to tell her story. “She came to me two or three days after his death and said, ‘I think it is time to put this to bed.’ She thought it was going to free her from the media. She thought ... the situation would ultimately go away,” says Terry.

So Terry went looking for legal advice. “It was simply to write a book.” No one thought about a movie until she found Wheaton, an entertainment lawyer.

Now, over tea at Lady Effie’s, Williams wants to know, “Who would play Strom?”

Clint Eastwood is Wheaton’s choice.

“He’s a very good actor, but I would like someone with a Southern accent,” she says, mentioning Patrick Swayze. “He was so good when he played that Southern general” in the ABC miniseries “North and South.”