Panel: Paternity, Memory, and the Boundaries of Biology, Culture, and
History
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser and Emily Hipchen
In “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond,” Essie Mae Washington- Williams describes the secret life both she and her father, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, maintained to protect him from exposure for his having fathered an African-American child. The text delineates the contradictions of identity her mixed race entailed, and how she managed both to conceal the revelations she eventually learned, and to grow up with self-confidence despite the necessary repression of her secret. How she negotiated both private and public awareness, self and history, is the burden of her confessional story. In the face of Thurmond’s financial generosity to her, combined with his reactionary politics, Washington-Williams threads a narrow line between affection and a sense of betrayal.
I focus on the change from her early outrage to later reconciliation, one that barely conceals her dismay at the hypocrisy that Thurmond’s position inevitably entailed. The complex writing replicates her life-long doubleness. I pair a discussion of Washington-Williams’ text with that of Bliss Broyard’s “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—a Story of Race and Family Secrets,” a work narrating the contrary racial secret. Bliss Broyard’s father, Anatole Broyard, was a light-skinned African-American who passed all his life as white. A writer and New York Times book critic, he never told his children the truth. When she finally learned, Bliss was fascinated, imagining herself as a part of history she had never realized before: “I felt like I mattered in a way that I hadn’t before.” I will trace the different ways both writers confront the challenge of recognizing new conceptions of the self, how their different positions regarding their fathers embed them in history as well as make them recalculate their identities, and finally, to inquire whether the question “Who am I?” can or should be answered in racial terms.
Roger Porter, Professor of English at Reed College, is the author of Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (2002) and The Voice Within: Reading and Writing Autobiography, with Howard Wolf (1973). His research and teaching interests are autobiography and life writing, Shakespeare, modern drama, modern fiction, and travel writing.