"All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."

- Strom Thurmond

So I guess ol' Strom didn't mind a little integration after all.

Granted, he made opposition to it the cornerstone of a political career that took him to the S.C. Statehouse and the U.S. Senate. True, he ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. Yes, he staged American history's longest filibuster to block a 1957 civil rights bill.

But in his 20s, Thurmond apparently had no qualms about integrating with his family's 16-year-old black maid.

The result of that union is Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher from Los Angeles.

Thurmond, who died in June at age 100, sent money over the years, apparently for her silence. She seems to have cared for him and believes he cared, too. Unfortunately, he didn't care enough to stop oppressing black people, which is what she considers herself. Blood is thicker than water, but politics is thicker than both.

One senses the media's uncertainty with this story. A radio anchor called it "surprising." "60 Minutes II" made it warm and fuzzy, the tale of a father's affection for a daughter he couldn't claim.

Given that a TV movie turned Thomas Jefferson's liaison with Sally Hemings into a "forbidden love" soap opera, I guess I should be thankful. At least no one has cast the senator and his maid as Romeo and Juliet.

Still, the media uncertainty is disappointing. What Thurmond did was hardly unique. It was common for young white men to test their sexual wings with black women their families owned or employed. Women who could not say "No."

This, at a time when the black man who so much as cast a stray glance at a white woman risked torture, murder and mutilation from white men crying "rape." Indeed, a black porter once let a white woman fall to the ground rather than steady her and have his intentions fatally misconstrued.

If it all sounds absurd and hypocritical, well, those are two words that attach quite handily to Thurmond's racial legacy. And to the nation's.

We tend to think of race as an unbreachable wall, black over here, white over there. But America is full of Essie Mae Washington-Williamses, full of people on both sides. White men spent centuries sneaking across the color line they had erected, to bed black cooks and maids.

It is said that this particular white man changed in later years as the civil rights movement he had opposed gave the ballot to black voters. He was, bless his heart, one of the first senators to hire a black aide.

And yet there was still this daughter, forbidden to call him "Father." For all he may have done and felt, he still saw his child as a shameful secret.

That's not a surprise or a warm and fuzzy tale.

It's just a reminder of the hypocrisy of bigotry, the fluidity of identity. Just evidence that American lives are often lies.

And that race is the biggest lie of them all.