In the midst of the debate over Confederate monuments, I’m reminded of the statue of Strom Thurmond that stands in front of the South Carolina state capitol. I saw it last year for the first time and was struck by the palimpest it’s become. The base of the statue lists both his accomplishments (minus, of course, his decades-long segregationist vitriole) and his children,  including Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whose story did not emerge publicly until several months after her father’s death.

What’s so striking about the monument—and a partial argument, I think, for keeping some of these statues intact and in situ—is the very obvious way Essie Mae’s name has been added to the list of his children. And the very clearly edited number of those children:

I’ve been told the reason the number “five” is smudged is because so many hands (many, if not most, of them African-American) have reached up to touch it—as if to prove this isn’t a mirage. Like a medieval relic, that edited number bears witness to a kind of miracle: the fact that the state of South Carolina, which until 2015 flew the Confederate flag over its state house, acknowledges, even honors, Essie Mae’s existence.

Context is everything when it comes to these statues, and I’m with those in the museum world (including Lonnie Bunch III of the National Museum of African American History) who’d like to see them preserved in museums, where viewers can probe their full and complicated meanings, rather than out-and-out destroyed. Meanwhile, let’s all work to make public as much of this sorrowful history as we can. Some parts of the story have seen entirely too much public light. Some have not seen remotely enough.