Among the lessons to be gleaned from the life of Essie Mae Washington-Williams is that truth need not be stranger than fiction; there are points where the two become nearly indistinguishable. Washington-Williams, who died this week at age eighty-seven, came to the public’s attention a decade ago, when she announced that she was the daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond. A media crush and a memoir followed, most playing up the seemingly obvious irony of a black woman fathered by the most recognizable segregationist in twentieth-century politics. Yet only in the most benign of readings could his behavior be understood as contradictory. For all his rhetoric about preserving racial purity, interracial sex was not contrary to Thurmond’s goals as a segregationist; on some level, it was entirely the point. His daughter’s tale stirred public controversy but its themes had been enshrined, if ignored, in the history, fiction, and lore of American racial history.

James Baldwin once remarked that segregationists weren’t truly driven by the cliché concern of preventing black men from marrying their daughters. Rather, he said, “You don’t want us to marry your wives’ daughters—we’ve been marrying your daughters since the days of slavery.” This is a truth that is forgotten among whites and rarely spoken among blacks. Revelations of the type Washington-Williams made in 2003 were shocking only to those privileged enough to not have this knowledge inflicted upon them personally or etched into their lineage and shaded—literally—into their family history.

In 2003, when the hazy borders between current events and reality TV were still intact, we processed Washington-Williams story as a political scandal, albeit a posthumous one. But in truth this was an affair of an altogether different genus than the family-values pol caught in a brothel or the homophobic pastor found to be conducting a same-sex affair. Hypocrisy may be the price we pay for having our biases catered to in public, but Thurmond’s actions weren’t so much hypocritical as they were surreptitious: not uncommon, just unspoken.

The historian Darlene Clark Hine has written that a key if seldom-discussed factor in the Great Migration was the desire of black women to escape the sexual exploitation implicit in domestic work—a concern that had also driven enslaved women to run away.

[In] Black women’s migration across time, from the flights of runaway slaves in the antebellum period to the great migrations of the first half of the twentieth century…the most compelling motive for running, fleeing, migrating was a desire to retain or claim some control and ownership of their own sexual beings and the children they bore.

In the midst of Essie Washington-Williams’s unburdening it seemed callous to reflect upon the ways in which her story pointed to the sexual vulnerability of women domestic workers, how her mother’s story was something closer to a rule than an exception.

Nor was it difficult to see in her story strains of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The broad contours are similar: a powerful white political figure, an illicit sexual relationship with a black woman of vastly subordinate status, offspring who are, at best, tacitly acknowledged. The most substantial similarity lies in the response to these revelations: shock among white observers, little more than a raised eyebrow among many black ones. These stories were not about the failings of individual imperfect men but parables for an entire set of experiences.

And as with the tale of Hemings and Jefferson, the initial shock gave way to a version improbably tinged in sepia and set to harp strings. Washington-Williams’s book, “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond” (her mother is unmentioned in the title), implies that she owes her birth to a forbidden love between her parents. She was born to the twenty-two-year-old white scion of a powerful South Carolina family and a sixteen-year-old black domestic worker (likely just fifteen when she became pregnant). The question, of course, was not whether the women in these stories consented to these relationships but whether they could reasonably have chosen not to.

Following a meeting when Washington-Williams herself was sixteen, Thurmond assumed financial responsibility for his daughter. He appeared in her life as a remote figure, dispensing resources and the occasional oblique acknowledgment of his paternity over the next six decades, during which time he ran for President on the 1948 Dixiecrat ticket, frequently denounced racial intermixture and, most memorably, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prevent its passage by the Senate. His largesse may have betrayed a genuine attachment to his daughter, but Thurmond was a political operator. He also knew his money helped secure his secret at a point when it might have immolated his political standing.

Within certain blinkered quarters during that era, children of Washington-Williams’s parentage were thought doomed to live tragic lives. Washington married Julius Williams, a black civil-rights attorney who detested Thurmond so fervently that she initially kept her relationship to the Senator secret from him. She earned a college degree, moved to Los Angeles, had children, and enjoyed a long career as an educator. The act of reconciling the failings of one’s parents is rarely simple. Yet Washington-Williams’s magnanimity toward Thurmond, even after six decades of silence, was striking, if not unsettling.

Her father was not an ambient racist, carried along by the provincial thinking of his times; he was dynamically racist, a man who helped shape and amplify those currents. That he had a black daughter doesn’t simply complicate his legacy, it further damns it. In ways that run contrary to any parental creed, he worked to make the world a worse place for his child and her children. He was unable to extrapolate the humanity he saw in the teen-age Essie Washington to a whole population who looked like her and shared her experiences. For her part, Washington-Williams seemed to have offered him amnesty on the most charitable of terms. If the story she told was meant to humanize her father, it tended, intentionally or not, to further elide her mother, of whom she spoke little, at least in public, and who died at the age of thirty-eight. Carrie Butler remains in the penumbra of history: obscured, but certainly not alone.

Photograph: Tami Chappell/Reuters