AS I TALK WITH white people my age and older about race, there is one uniquely Southern story many share with me. They talk about how they met the sweetest black woman they ever knew during their childhood — the family maid.

They talk in warm, sincere tones about this woman as they call her by her first name and declare, “She was just like family.”

I’m sure some of them had good relationships with their maids. However, many Southern white families — despite the “fond memories” — treated their maids like anything but family. After the Civil War and well into the 20th century, black domestic servants often were treated like objects, the continuing influence of slavery.

Black maids were very poorly paid, relegated to second-class status and often endured sexual exploitation from men in the white homes where they worked.

With the recent news about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s relationship with his family’s maid decades ago, people have become curious about the relationships between maids and the families they served. No one knows the nature of the relationship between Sen. Thurmond and Carrie Butler other than it led to the birth of a child, Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Many are wondering whether this was a love child or a situation in which the 22-year-old son of a powerful white family took advantage of a 16-year-old black servant.

History tells us black maids were not treated as employees worthy of a decent salary and respect, let alone as family.

I know. My mom was a maid for a local veterinarian in Columbia for a number of years in the 1960s and 1970s. He would leave the comfort of Shandon and cross Rosewood Drive into our all-black, tattered neighborhood to pick up my mom about three times a week for work. After three full days of labor, she would collect $20 in pay.

My mom cooked, cleaned, and helped raise the family’s children. She was like family, they said.

Yet, she would have to enter the home through the back door. If she ever ate there, she would have to do so in the kitchen.

I remember my mom coming home with second-hand clothing and shoes, curtains and other items — things we could use — that had been passed on by her employer. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, he would deliver a box of fruit, nuts, candy, cookies and a ham or turkey to our home.

The veterinarian took a particular interest in me; I always appreciated that. He would keep up with my grades. During the high school football season, he would make sure I had enough money to go the Booker T. Washington High School games to see one of my older brothers, Eugene, play.

I could never really make sense of the mixed messages I received as I watched this relationship between my mom and the family she worked for. They seemed to be decent, well-meaning people. Yet, it was obvious they were supposed to be better than we were.

The Strom Thurmond story had me thinking once again about this strange relationship. So much so that I revisited Susan Tucker’s book, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and their Employers in the Segregated South.

Published in 1988, the book includes narratives based on interviews with 21 black domestics and 21 Southern white women who employed black women in their homes. It explores race relations through the relationships between black domestics and white women.

“By going into whites’ homes, black women were reminded daily of the relative material wealth of whites. When black domestics labored for working-class whites, they were reminded every day that they were seen as inferior,” wrote Ms. Tucker, a white woman who grew up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

For some whites, black maids were seen as loyal servants, just like their ancestors who stayed by their masters’ sides after the Civil War, she wrote. Black maids stayed up all night caring for a sick white child, visited former employers in the nursing home, and so on. In return, black maids were given gifts, such as old furniture, clothing and food, to supplement their wages. Their children’s education would be paid for or they might stay rent-free in houses owned by employers.

Ms. Tucker said she was told the system worked because there were good blacks who worked hard and good whites made sure they were taken care of.

“Yet, when I looked around at the lives of the maids I knew, I did not always see that the whites’ care or affection for these black women made their lives noticeably better. In particular, I remember a feeling of sadness that their houses — which I, like other white children, might visit — seemed very substandard. No lovely Persian rug given away because a better one had been inherited, no slightly faded, hand-me-down chintz curtains could cover up the fact that these black women lived lives of poverty.”

Here is what one maid said in Ms. Tucker’s book: “They had separate bathrooms and everything for you — everywhere, in those days. They would build an outhouse and bathroom outside before you could use the bathroom that you cleaned inside. They didn’t want stains in their bathrooms! It’s just been in recent years, they’ve started letting people go in their bathrooms. And they had certain dishes you could eat out of. You ate out of certain dishes, and your particular plate and fork and spoon went in a certain place.”

Is there any better way to treat someone who is “just like family?”

Reach Mr. Bolton at (803) 771-8631 or wbolton@thestate.com.