COLUMBIA, S.C. - "I always thought I had a fairly normal childhood, until I found out my parents weren't who I thought they were."

So begins the autobiography of Essie Mae Washington Williams, the daughter of longtime U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond and a 16-year-old black maid who worked at his family's Edgefield home.

Williams came forward a year ago, after Thurmond's death, with the secret she had held for more than 70 years. Now her book, "Dear Sen.: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond," deals with her relationship with the one-time segregationist who privately acknowledged her as his child but never spoke of her publicly.

The book, co-written with William Stadiem, is set to be released Jan. 27 by ReganBooks, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.

Williams was raised in Coatesville, Pa., by Mary and John Washington. Her world changed at age 13 when Mary Washington's sister, Carrie Butler, told Essie Mae that she was her biological mother.

Williams, now 79, yearned to know more about her other family. She got some answers a few years later when she returned to her native Edgefield to attend a funeral. Butler took her to a law office in town where Essie Mae first met Thurmond.

"He never called my mother by her first name. He didn't verbally acknowledge that I was his child. He didn't ask when I was leaving and didn't invite me to come back. It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father," Williams wrote.

So went the first of many visits between Thurmond and Williams. He provided for her financially, but the visits were always formal events where Thurmond - a health fanatic - asked more questions about her exercise and eating habits than her personal life.

After Williams graduated from high school, she became attracted to a field where her father also had worked: teaching.

During one visit around 1946, Thurmond offered to pay her tuition at an all-black college in Orangeburg, now known as South Carolina State University.

Williams moved back south, where she quickly had to adapt to a segregated culture. The black students rarely left campus, and when they did, were forced to sit in the backs of buses and visit only certain restaurants and shops.

Many of her classmates came from prosperous black families. Her friends liked to talk about their fathers' jobs, but Williams held back.

"With all the family comparisons, I was tempted to brag about my father. ... But the temptation quickly passed. I wasn't crazy. And I was very grateful to my father for making it possible to come here to State. I couldn't afford to lose the opportunity in front of me. For me, it was a state of grace."

During her college years, Thurmond visited Williams a couple times. They met privately in the school president's office, even as Thurmond's political career was taking off and he became governor. Williams loved that her father was willing to take such risks.

"My connection to my father was hardly fatherly, however. It remained as distant as when I had visited him with my two mothers. Our surface dealings were precisely that, all superficial and completely unemotional, despite my inner turmoil."

Williams watched her father's career from afar. She attended his gubernatorial inauguration in January 1947 with her classmates. She watched her father and his family.

"This was my family, but I didn't know them and they didn't know me. In time, in time, I prayed to myself. If my father could change this state, with its Confederate flags flying and its Confederate soldiers standing vigil atop their obelisks, I had reason to hope he could change his own house," she writes.

Thurmond disappointed Williams as his political star rose. "He became an outright racist, cloaked in the ancient doctrine of states' rights," she wrote.

Thurmond defended segregation laws, saying they were needed to protect the purity of the races.

"I wasn't sure if this was my father talking or the ghost of Adolf Hitler," she wrote.

He ran for president as the State's Rights Party candidate during the 1948 election, during which he he said, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, our schools, our churches, our homes."

Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering when he spoke against a bill to end discrimination in housing.

On one visit, Williams asked Thurmond how he could say such things about blacks. She said it was unfair how blacks were treated, but he defended it as the culture and custom of the South.

Over the decades, Williams tried to reconcile the fiery politician with the man who treated her kindly, providing money for her and her family.

"It's not that Strom Thurmond ever swore me to secrecy. He never swore me to anything. He trusted me, and I respected him, and we loved each other in our deeply repressed ways, and that was our social contract," she wrote.

Thurmond eventually softened his political stance and renounced racism.

Williams went on to receive her bachelor's degree from California State University-Los Angeles in 1969. She later obtained her master's degree in education and taught in public schools for 27 years.

She said Thurmond's death in 2003 at age 100 left her unsettled. Her daughter encouraged her to make her story public, and Thurmond's family soon after acknowledged her heritage.

"In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was, without the subterfuges of the previous 65 years," Williams wrote. "I may have called it 'closure,' but it was much more like an opening, a very grand opening."

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