Thirteen-year-old Essie Mae Washington was living in Coatesville, Pa., the home of her parents in the late ’30s, when a woman who said she was her aunt came to visit.

One lovely, crisp fall day when the leaves were turning red and gold, a very beautiful woman came to visit us. My mother introduced her as her sister Carrie, and she was the most amazing woman I have ever seen.

My mother seemed tall at five-foot-five, but Carrie towered above her by at least three or more inches. Because of this, Carrie called her sister “Tiny.”

She moved and dressed like a fashion model — not that her clothes were fancy, but the way she carried herself in them was regal. She wore a plain cotton dress with a string of dime-store pearls, yet she looked as elegant as any of the rich swells in the Fred Astaire high-society films, as naturally aristocratic as Katharine Hepburn, living proof that a black woman could hold her own against any Hollywood ideals.

Because she carried herself like a big-city sophisticate, I immediately presumed Aunt Carrie was visiting from New York City, which I thought was the ultimate in glamour. But she actually had just moved up north from Rock Hill, near my parents’ home of Edgefield. She was living in Chester, which was only an hour away from us.

The whole day Aunt Carrie was there, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Nor could she take her eyes off me.

I followed her into the kitchen to help prepare an early dinner before she had to take the train home. Aunt Carrie was busy, when she stopped what she was doing and just looked at me for the longest time. I thought maybe I had done something wrong. But then she gave me the sweetest smile.

“I’m your mother, you know,” she said to me.

I was stunned speechless.

“Did you know?” she pressed me.

“No, ma’am,” was all I could say.

“Let me give you a big kiss, Essie Mae,” she said to me.

My eyes became riveted to the floor, my body paralyzed from moving an inch.

“Don’t be afraid of me.” She opened her arms in a huge embrace.

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t you ‘no, ma’am’ me, child. You’re my daughter, my big beautiful daughter,” she said and walked over and enveloped me in her embrace. It was the strangest moment of my life so far. It also may have been the happiest.

I was deeply confused. If this was my mother, what about ... my real mother ... her sister? I felt like I was on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth:” Will Essie Mae’s real mother please stand up? Aunt Carrie — I wasn’t sure what to call her now — sensed my utter and complete confusion.

“This is awful to do to you,” she apologized, “but I love you too much to keep my mouth shut. I just had to see you.”

“But why ...,” I stammered. “What happened?”

I had always thought my parents had me back in South Carolina and then moved up to Coatesville. Here was a woman, the most beautiful woman on earth, who was claiming to be my mother.

At this point my mother — that is, the woman who had been my mother until a few moments ago — entered the kitchen and saw the look on my face.

“Carrie! You didn’t ... did you?”

“I did, Tiny. I just couldn’t keep it to myself. I’m so sorry.”

VISITING EDGEFIELD

As a 16-year-old, Essie Mae Washington went to Edgefield with her mother, Carrie Butler, to go to the funeral of an aunt.

Old Buncombe was a desperate shantytown of the kinds of unpainted wooden shacks and outhouses. How could people live in such squalor? I wondered. I was about to learn firsthand, because the people who lived in these shacks were my people.

“This is it,” my mother said.

“It” was a letdown, to say the least — a crumbling, unpainted wooden shack. A large woman wearing a head scarf like the one Mary wore around the house stepped off the porch to greet us.

“Well, I’ll be,” the woman said, giving me a big hug. “It’s been a long time. Come to your Aunt Bertha.”

Bertha, a Paul Bunyan of a woman, seemed to pick up all our bags at once and bring them into the house. At first glance, it seemed even more depressing inside than out, a dank cavelike single room subdivided with hanging sheets to create some cubicles where we might have privacy. There was no electricity, no running water, no phone, nothing.

Bertha filled this shack with a spirit that took my mind completely off the surroundings. That night we all huddled around an old wood burning stove for warmth, as it got cold in that damp wooded area behind the rich folks’ homes.

It was like camping out. As I had never camped out overnight before, I decided to look at it as an adventure.

The day after the funeral, Carrie woke me. “You’ve got to get up and get dressed,” she told me in a whisper as to not disturb the others, who were sleeping. “And look ‘specially nice.”

She was all dressed up in a lovely frock, with pearls and earrings. I assumed we were going back to church for more services, but what my mother had on didn’t strike me as mourning attire. She picked my nicest dress out of my suitcase, combed out my hair and told me to put on makeup.

“Too much lipstick,” she scolded me, wiping some off. I redid my lips, wanting desperately to please her.

She was so beautiful, I felt I could never compare with her, no matter how hard I tried.

My mother decided she didn’t like the dress after all. “Too sad,” she said.

“But aren’t funerals supposed to be sad?”

“This isn’t a funeral, darling,” she said with that mysterious laugh of hers. “I’m taking you to meet your father.”

We walked up the steep hills of Old Buncombe to the paradise of Buncombe Street. The shacks were all quiet. The black world was sleeping.

I kept wondering when my mother would turn so that I could meet my fate. At first I thought it might be one of those big white-columned mansions where this mysterious man might be working as a butler to some rich family. But we kept walking down that dusty, oak-shaded road, straight into downtown. Maybe he was a barber or a porter in the Plantation House hotel, but we passed those establishments as well.

Finally, we arrived at a one-story white building that housed a law office. Thurmond and Thurmond, Attorneys at Law, the sign said.

That was it. My new daddy was a driver for a big-shot lawyer. We went up the steps and knocked on the door. A black servant in a white coat opened the door. I wanted to throw my arms around him, but he just looked at me blankly.

Then he showed us into a grand office, stocked floor to ceiling with law books and diplomas. My heart was pounding so hard I feared it might be audible.

A fair, handsome man entered the room — a little nervously, I thought. He wore a light blue suit and tie, and looked every inch the lord of a plantation. He gazed at my mother a long time, then stared at me even longer. Finally, his stone face broke into a smile. “You have a lovely young daughter,” he said in a deep, commanding voice.

I was speechless.

“Essie Mae,” Carrie said, with a big smile, “meet your father.”

This was even crazier than when I learned Carrie was my mother. Now I saw that my real father was a handsome, charming and rich white lawyer. I didn’t know this man’s name, my father’s name. Thurmond and Thurmond, I remembered the sign.

“Hello ... Mister ... Thurmond,” I stuttered.

“What do you think of our beautiful city?” he asked me.

“It’s different from my home.”

“This is your home, Essie Mae. You must think of yourself as a South Carolinian. This is a wonderful city, a wonderful state.”

“Nine governors (from Edgefield),” was all I could say.

“Maybe 10,” Carrie added cryptically, winking at the man, who smiled sweetly back at her.

“The Palmetto State. Do you know what a palmetto is, Essie Mae?” Mr. Thurmond asked me.

“No, sir.”

“It’s a small palm tree, what they call a cabbage palm, native to our state. Look here.” He put his arm on my back, which gave me an electric shock, and led me over to a wall and a framed souvenir of what looked to be two sides of a large coin, which is what he pointed out to me.

“This is our state seal. See the palmetto, growing out of that fallen oak. That represents our great victory, from a fort built of palmetto logs, over the British fleet made of oak. That Latin phrase there, Quis Separabit ... do you know what that means?”

“No, sir.”

“Take a guess, Essie Mae.”

I looked helplessly at my mother, who couldn’t suppress her laugh. “Your father used to be a schoolteacher.”

Mr. Thurmond, which was the only name I could have for him, put his hand on my shoulder. “It means ‘Who Can Separate Us?’ ”

I took the comment seriously and was deeply flattered by it.

“You must learn Latin, Essie Mae. It’ll help you with a lot of things.”

I realized this visit wasn’t some spontaneous drop-in but had been planned.

When he pulled out two chairs to offer seats to my mother and me, his hand brushed over hers, and he held it there just a moment longer. Her eyes looked up and met his. They were in love, clearly in love. In that split second I could tell what was going on, and it was as strange to me as seeing aliens from another galaxy.

“I’m terribly sorry about your aunt,” Mr. Thurmond said to me, condolences that were wasted, as I didn’t know her. He had clearly already shared his sympathies with my mother.

“She worked for our family. Wonderful lady. Fine seamstress. It’s a shame to lose someone so young.”

He then segued into a concern for me.

He turned to Carrie and said, “I hope you’re feeding her right. Diet is the key to longevity.”

Carrie avoided his gaze. So Mr. Thurmond turned to me and looked me up and down, like a prize cow.

“I would stay just as you are, not another pound more. Be careful of that fried food, no matter how good it tastes. It can kill you. And drink plenty of water, at least three big glasses a day, one before every meal. That way you won’t eat as much. And walk everywhere you can.”

“He used to be a coach, too,” Carrie interjected, and that made Mr. Thurmond laugh heartily.

Eventually, it was time to go. Mr. Thurmond would have kept talking, but Carrie said, “I know you’ve got important work to do.”

Mr. Thurmond stood up and bowed cavalierly to both of us. Then he must have decided that wasn’t “fatherly” enough, so he came out from behind his massive oak desk and shook my hand, then my mother’s. Not a kiss, but the strongest, bone-crushing handshake I had ever experienced.

He took a last long look at me.

“She has my sister Gertrude’s cheekbones,” he marveled. “Isn’t she a lovely girl? You have a lovely daughter.”

It was a kind thought, but inside it hurt me. I would have liked to have heard him say, “We have a lovely daughter.”

When he closed the door to his office, and we were standing out on the street near the main square, it was as if it had been a dream, a crazy dream.

I looked hard at the sign: Thurmond and Thurmond, Attorneys at Law. I now noticed the names on the bottom: “J. William Thurmond and J. Strom Thurmond.”

“Which ‘J’ is he?” I asked Carrie.

“Strom.”

“Who is he?” I wanted to know.

“A lawyer, a judge, a very powerful judge,” she answered.

Excerpted with permission from “Dear Senator, A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond,” by Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem, published by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher. The book is on sale at area bookstores and other retail outlets.