by Paul Theroux
They were the most obviously wealthy and best-dressed people I had seen in all my travels in the South, and I had never seen so formal an event on so large a scale in such a provincial place. Perhaps the very provinciality of the remote place was an incentive for these partygoers to assert themselves as socialites. Where do you find elaborate dinners, stiff-collared men, and bejeweled women? Often you find them in the boondocks, where in their finery they are making a statement, the assertion that they are not hicks.
“These are the horse people, the polo people, the real well-to-do people,” Lyle said.
“The white people,” I said.
“I guess.”
Greeting one another, calling out, shaking hands, exchanging kisses, the elite of Aiken and the nearby horse farms filed into the enormous tent, where there was color and light, food and wine and gaiety. This was the annual dinner party for the Imperial Cup Steeplechase, “Blossoms and Bow Ties—a Garden Party Gala.” At $120 per person the event drew a select crowd, and because it was a self-conscious reenactment of an earlier time of social exclusion—an extension of the plutocratic culture of the Aiken winter colony—it could be easily satirized as squires and stuffed shirts on parade. Yet it was far too good-humored an occasion to be mocked; it was a feast, a reward, a celebration. And as the Aiken Steeplechase Association advertised, some of the revenue was used for charity, helping hard-up people and neglected animals in and around Aiken.
It was a cold night. The frat boys had wandered away. I stood in the clammy darkness, peering at the many hundreds of elegantly dressed people in the warm bright tent, laughing among the ice sculptures and flower arrangements, eating and drinking.
“There is always a certain element of insolence in being well-fed, as in every aspect of power,” Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend in 1892 while living in Melikhovo, a provincial town smaller than Aiken but with a distinct resemblance: farms, horses, landlords, classy people, overworked peasants. “And that element expresses itself chiefly in the well-fed preaching to the hungry.”
At dawn on the day of the steeplechase, cold rain fell on Aiken. “It should clear by noon,” I heard someone say as I walked along the boulevard of Richland Avenue, which was the town’s main street. When I got to the racecourse there was no letup, and toward noon the rain came harder, thrashing the oaks at the perimeter of the racecourse, gusts of wind driving against the tents and shelters of people who lined the enclosure adjacent to it. I was reminded of how bad weather in the South seemed worse, more punishing, than in most other places I knew, more dramatic, because it came and went quickly.
The rain did not faze the racecourse people. They were there to drink, to grill hamburgers, to have a good time, and were undeterred by the driving rain and cold wind. They stood in wet feet, in extravagant and brightly colored clothes—striped blazers and straw hats for the men, flamboyant wide-brimmed hats and gauzy dresses for the women. They drank with the determination of sailors weathering a gale and shouted into the wind.
Though it somewhat resembled a tailgate party, to simplify the occasion with that name was to do it an injustice. It was an enormous, well-organized picnic set out like a camp meeting, a thousand people roistering in the rain, pouring drinks from coolers stacked in the back of their SUVs or pickup trucks, huddled in tents or around gas grills and barbecues.
This peripheral event was a celebration of horsemanship, friends and family, and money. It would be a brave outsider who dared to join this group unbidden, but when I told a man I was a stranger, he said—and it was the second time in the South someone said this to me—“Ain’t no strangers here,” and he insisted I have a drink with him.
I remarked that in spite of all the drunkenness—not yet noon and people were staggering and falling in the mud—it was fairly orderly.
“These here are designated spots,” he said. “Very hard to get one. They keep them in the family and get handed down.”
The race was not the point; gathering was the point, and dressing up and being happy. The party was the pride of the town, and as everyone said, it was greatly anticipated. Some people showed me their albums with pictures of last year’s steeplechase—sunny and hot, people sprawled in the grass. Months of planning had gone into this, and as for the bad weather, it was something to laugh about, and toast, and use as a way of joking with me.
The race was still a few hours away, but for them the race was just another aspect of the binge. It was steeplechase day—not old or even continuous in Aiken: the Steeplechase Association had started in 1930, foundered for twenty-five years, then restarted in 1967. Now it was enshrined as a tradition, in a town—you could say a region—that needed rituals that could be passed down to a new generation, especially rituals that were local, demonstrated community pride, and had the flavor of exclusivity.
Here is what struck me. The wealthy people at the pre-steeplechase party were predictably classy, perhaps snobbish, and easy targets. But the steeplechase had a wider reach than that. Almost the whole town had turned up. I had not expected so many people, from all parts of the town, the locals, the tradesmen, the real estate brokers, the shop girls and store clerks, the college students, the high school kids, the women and girls in homemade hats and summer dresses, the boys and men in blazers and silly hats. They were having a good time, even the ones who were wandering among the tents and stalls in groups, watching the games, being happy in the rain.
And you could be heartened by such a display of enthusiasm and hospitality and good will. All you had to do was pretend that blacks did not exist in Aiken.
The Secret Life of a Segregationist
A few months before I arrived in town, a woman from Aiken died, and her death revived an old story. Her name was Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Her obituary appeared in the Aiken Standard on February 5, 2013: “Biracial Daughter of Strom Thurmond Dies at 87.”
Strom Thurmond, the ardent segregationist, was born in 1902, about twenty miles up the road from Aiken, past the peach orchards, in the small town of Edgefield. But his preferred place of worship, the First Baptist Church, was in Aiken—an imposing steepled structure of red brick and white columns. He had owned various homes in Aiken, and his second wife, Nancy, had been born in the town. Aiken had a right to claim him. He lived for a hundred years, and he embodied in his century all the contradictions of the South—like the Aiken steeplechase, a joyous and heartening celebration until you realized that it was by tradition a purely white event, the very sort of occasion that Strom Thurmond advocated for much of his life, as a believer in racial separation.
A Clemson University graduate, a decorated soldier in World War Two (in combat in the Normandy invasion), later a lawyer and attorney general and one-term governor and (in 1948) presidential candidate, Thurmond was elected to the United States Senate in 1954 and remained there until his death in 2003. He was one of the longest-serving senators in American history, forty-eight years of ranting and filibustering on behalf of the South’s antiquated racial policies, and against civil rights legislation, with an especial vehemence for the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
He was also, from his earliest years, an advocate of states’ rights and later an initiator of the “Southern Manifesto,” a document of rage and racial exclusion, which was written in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation ruling. “Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside mediators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public school systems,” the document proclaimed. “If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States.” In another part, it spoke “with the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers.”
Now here is the oddity, and a revelation of the secrecy of the man, and a clue to the inner life of the South. And, you might say, a reason for an outsider in these parts to take nothing for granted, or at face value.
At Thurmond’s home in Edgefield, one of the black housemaids
was sixteen-year-old Carrie Butler, known affectionately (and obscurely) as “Tunch.” In this household of segregationists, Strom Thurmond took her as his lover, and afterward, in 1925, their daughter, Essie Mae, was born in Aiken—Thurmond’s first child, and Carrie’s too. He was twenty-two at the time, an undergraduate at whites-only Clemson, studying horticulture, preparing for the farming career he hoped to have: a vision of cotton fields, an Aiken boy’s dream.6
Thurmond, of all people, would have been keenly aware that in 1925 miscegenation was a crime throughout the South, punishable by one to five years in prison in most of its states. Anti-miscegenation laws were enforced, more or less, though in 1932 South Carolina reduced miscegenation from a felony to a misdemeanor. To keep the birth a secret, and to resolve what was obviously an awkward as well as unlawful situation, Carrie Butler arranged for her aunt Essie Washington (after whom her daughter was named) and Essie’s husband, John, to adopt Essie Mae when she was six months old. They took her to live with them in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. There Essie Mae remained, raised by the Washingtons (and Aunt Essie’s sister Mary), whose surname she took as her own, not knowing who her real father was.
Abandoning the idea of being a farmer, Thurmond went on to earn a law degree and set himself up in an office in Edgefield. He was an unmarried local boy, but with helpful political connections; he was appointed county attorney, then circuit judge, and the war in Europe got him thinking of joining the army. He had no idea what had happened to Carrie or the small girl whose name he did not know, but was soon to learn.
Sometime in 1941, Carrie Butler, who had since moved to Chester, Pennsylvania, to be near her daughter, visited Essie Mae at the Washingtons’ in Coatesville. Carrie said, “I’m going to take you to introduce you to your father.”
Essie Mae was then sixteen, the same age Carrie had been when she’d been seduced by the son of her white employer. Love was not a factor in the situation, Essie later said; nothing like Thomas Jefferson and his black slave Sally Hemings, whose romance had resulted in six biracial children, four of whom survived—a love story that unfolded over many years and two continents, from Monticello to Paris and back.
Essie Mae had no idea who her father was or even that he was white. Her mother had not spoken about his race, Essie Mae recalled later (to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, in a 2003 interview from which many of these quotations are taken). “And when I met him, I was surprised, because she’d never mentioned that he was white.”
Thurmond said, “That’s a beautiful daughter you have.”
Carrie said, “She’s your daughter too.”
“And he was glad to meet me,” Essie Mae said, “because of course, he had never seen me. And it was a very nice meeting. And we talked about various things such as what I planned to do in life.”
Peering at the teenager, Thurmond remarked, “Well, you look like one of my sisters. You’ve got those cheekbones like our family.”
This seemed a tacit admission of Essie Mae’s being his daughter. In her autobiography, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (2005), she was clear-sighted about the mood of the meeting. “He didn’t ask when I was leaving and didn’t invite me to come back. It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father.”
But she did see Thurmond again. And as well as giving advice, he gave her money, at first hundred-dollar bills stuffed in envelopes, which Essie Mae picked up at his Senate office—a day’s travel back and forth from Pennsylvania—and then, to save her time, he put personal checks in the mail. Keen for her to get an education, he urged her to study at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. She did so, and from time to time he visited her, not disclosing the relationship to anyone but continuing his financial support.
“Well, whenever I was in need, he would help me out financially,” Essie Mae said. After the early death, at forty-five, of her husband, she was in need again, and Thurmond sent money to help the thirty-nine-year-old widow in raising her four children. This arrangement continued until her children were grown.
Inevitably, there was talk, but it was local gossip. In Edgefield and Aiken, “among the black people it was common knowledge.” Yet here is another paradox of the hugger-mugger business. Because blacks and whites were kept so separate, little information was passed from one community to the other. “[Blacks] didn’t do too much talking to other people.”
Nor did Essie Mae speak about it. “It wasn’t to my advantage to talk about anything that he had done,” she said. “And he, of course, didn’t want it to be known.” Thurmond had not forbidden her from saying anything—there was no “agreement,” as she put it. There was simply no point in talking. And she was well aware that Thurmond’s political position would have been at risk had the secret been revealed. Essie Mae said, “I didn’t want to do anything to harm his career.”
Even so, after Thurmond became governor, he visited Essie Mae at her college in Orangeburg, and she paid him visits at the governor’s mansion in Columbia. They would sit in his office, and he would talk, and Essie Mae would listen. Thurmond revealed himself as something of a health nut and life coach. “His talks were always on health, exercise, nutrition, and what I was going to do.”
While still in college, and visiting Thurmond, Essie Mae asked him directly about his racial politics. “Why was he a racist, a segregationist, at that time?” she wondered. “And he said, ‘Well, that’s the way things have always been.’”
He had not originated the concept of segregation or Jim Crow laws, he said. All that was a cultural legacy. He was merely upholding them as traditional legislation. “You know, that’s the way it was in the South,” Essie Mae said afterward. She felt that he was not at heart a racist. “I think he did what he did to promote his career.”
Bill Clinton said something similar at the funeral of Robert Byrd: the implied dictum of Southern politics, that ethical beliefs and strong moral positions are for suckers and losers—you have to compromise, fiddle, and be a hypocrite to hold office in Dixie. Byrd was another long-serving Southern senator—and he had held high office as Exalted Cyclops of his local branch of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. “He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia,” Clinton said in his mellifluous eulogy in Charleston in 2010. “He was trying to get elected.”
In other words, like most politicians, animated by pretension. But after Byrd was elected his views did not change much, nor did Thurmond’s, until long after the tide turned and overwhelmed them, and both men turned and went with the flow. Like Thurmond, Byrd was opposed to moves toward integration, and he remained an obstacle to civil rights legislation, a filibusterer against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a denouncer of so-called race mixing.
“No decent and self-respecting Negro would ask for a law to force people to accept him where he is not wanted,” Thurmond said in a speech in Jackson, Mississippi, in May 1948, where he was firing the opening volleys in a run for president. “They themselves do not want social intermingling.” Fielding Wright, the Mississippi governor, was present at the gathering. The day before, he had advised blacks who asked for equal opportunity to “make your home in some state other than Mississippi.”
A few weeks later, tipped to be a presidential candidate on the States’ Rights Democratic Party ticket, Thurmond screamed at a crowd in Birmingham, Alabama (a Movietone News film was made of this speech): “But I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that 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.”
That was the year Carrie Butler, the black mother of his child, died at the age of thirty-nine, when Essie Mae was a student in Orangeburg.
For a while the financial arrangement between Essie Mae and Thurmond continued. Essie Mae married, became Mrs. Washington-Williams, and bore four children (Wanda, Monica, Ronald, and Julius), and still fath
er and daughter kept in touch now and then. Essie Mae aged gracefully; Thurmond got a hair transplant and dyed his plugs reddish brown. In the 1960s, Ebony magazine attempted to do a story on the rumored relationship, but Essie Mae demurred, saying she had nothing to reveal, and wouldn’t cooperate. She sent the reporters away. She kept silent for sixty years, and worked as a respected schoolteacher in Los Angeles.
Then, in 2003, Strom Thurmond died. And reflecting on her own age, nearly eighty, and her children, and the fact that Thurmond could not be hurt by anything she said, she came forward five months after his death, in December of that year. Standing before reporters in South Carolina, she told her story, saying, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
Her health was poor, her children were grown—it was they who had persuaded her that her story needed to be told. She said she felt she owed it to history to declare who she was. She wasn’t looking for money. “I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
“My children deserve the right to know from whom, where and what they have come,” Ms. Washington-Williams said at the press conference. “I am committed in teaching them and helping them to learn about their past. It is their right to know and understand the rich history of their ancestry, black and white.”
It was a relief, she said afterward. “I would say 50 or 60 years now this thing has been following me. So the fact that I am coming up now to talk about it is like a burden lifted. Because I had this secret. And even though many people did know about it, I hadn’t gotten it off my shoulders.” It was, she said, “a legacy.”
She had by then moved back to South Carolina from Los Angeles. She died in Columbia, not far from Aiken, where she was born, just a few months before I was rambling around Aiken and Edgefield, and pondering the paradoxes of the South.
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