These Walls Between Us (eBook)

From an author of the best-selling womens health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white womans necessary learning, and a Black womans complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read. (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.)In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanfords family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Marys skilled serviceand each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black help and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years latereach divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activistthey began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow.Based on decades worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Uschronicles the two womens friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend. The book examines obstacles created by Wendys upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the works primary author, Mary read and commented on every draftand together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice.