![]() Maybe her father worked as a butler for a rich white family, Essie Mae thought. In their finest dresses, Carrie and Essie Mae walked past the shacks of Edgefield’s black ghetto and into the white side of town. ![]() It was her first trip to South Carolina, her first exposure to segregated trains and “whites only” drinking fountains.Ĭarrie woke Essie Mae early on the morning after the funeral. Essie Mae Washington didn’t learn who her real mother was until she was 13, when Carrie Butler, visiting her sister, blurted out the truth: “I’m your mother.”īut Essie Mae had no knowledge about her father’s identity until three years later, in 1941, when she traveled to Edgefield to attend a family funeral. ![]() Mary Washington and her husband raised the girl as their daughter. To avoid scandal, Carrie sent Essie to live with her sister, Mary Washington, in Pennsylvania. “One thing led to another,” as Butler later put it, and on October 12, 1925, she gave birth to Thurmond’s first child, a girl she named Essie Mae. Carrie was pretty, and Strom, a handsome schoolteacher, flirted with her as she went about her work in his parents’ house. She was Carrie Butler, a part-time maid in the Thurmond house. ![]() He was Strom Thurmond, son of a powerful lawyer in Edgefield, S.C. ![]()
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