Author: Carolyn Hooker
Date/Time: Tuesday 10/27/2026 at 11:00 AM
Book: Leaving Edgefield: Carrie Butler’s Story
Synopsis: An English teacher for over 30 years at both the high school and college levels and native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Carolyn W. Hooker received a B.S. Degree in Education and an M.A. Degree in English from the University of South Carolina. It was at USC graduate school where she developed a love for literature under such notable professors as Donald J. Greiner and James Dickey. "Leaving Edgefield: Carrie Butler’s Story" is a work of historical fiction that reimagines a story silenced by time. Set in 1948 in the poverty ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital, "Leaving Edgefield" introduces Carrie Butler, the mother of Strom Thurmond's secret bi-racial daughter. Carrie is dying of renal failure at age thirty-eight while, at the same time, Thurmond is running as the Dixiecrat segregationist candidate for President of the United States. Carrie has asked the eminent Philadelphia attorney, Mrs. Sadie T. M. Alexander, whom Carrie met in her job as a seamstress, to document her story to ensure that Thurmond will keep the promise he made to pay for their daughter's education. Because Carrie is dying, her urgency to tell her story propels the novel from beginning to end. After Thurmond died in 2003 at the age of 100, his biological daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams, publicly revealed her father's identity. The author relied on extensive information available about Thurmond and his family, as well as on the limited information available on Carrie Butler and her relatives, to try to piece together the events of her life and imagine the interaction that occurred between the two. While no one will ever know the true nature of their relationship,"“I am inclined to believe that the complete imbalance of power between Thurmond, the 22-year-old son of a powerful, white Southern family, and Butler, a 16-year-old black maid in the Thurmond household, would have made such a relationship unlikely and have taken that stance in the novel."
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