“This tender and evocative story about friendship across racial and class lines is told with unflagging honesty and is an important guide for living in this time of racial reckoning.”
—Catherine Whitmire, author of Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk through the Quaker Tradition and Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity
In the mid-1950s, a young Black teenager named Mary White traveled north from Virginia to work for Wendy Sanford’s family as a live-in domestic worker for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Mary was fifteen, Wendy was twelve. As the Black “help” and the privileged white daughter, they were not slated for friendship—but Wendy’s parents kept bringing Mary back each summer and when Wendy and Mary, now adults, found themselves both divorced, single mothers, they began to walk the beach together at nightfall. They shared their challenges with the drinking in Wendy’s family—Wendy as a daughter of alcoholics, Mary as a domestic worker negotiating her employers’ complex and intense cross-currents—and they began to consider each other friends.
Though changed by the social movements of their time—civil rights, multiracial feminism, gay rights, liberation theology—Wendy often stumbled in her friendship with Mary, tripping over obstacles created by her own formation in the narrow world of race and class privilege that is white supremacy. In These Walls Between Us, she lifts up the lessons of her slow journey toward seeing Mary more fully across the socially constructed barriers between them—that is, toward being a truer friend—draws on key works by Black writers to illuminate herself and the text, and writes, with a white readership in mind, about the ways in which white people “embody and enact white supremacy.”
