Introduction

From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman’s missteps and necessary lessons, and a Black woman’s 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 Sanford’s 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 Mary’s skilled service—and 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 later—each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist—they 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 Us chronicles the two women’s 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 Wendy’s 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 work’s primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft—and 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.

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Excerpt

Introduction
I GREW UP IN THE NORTHEAST UNITED STATES, AMIDST white people who thought ourselves a world apart from the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan—the violent, radical fringe. And yet, I grew up embedded in racist violence myself, just of a variety that was polite and normalized in American life, in which every institution advanced white people at the expense of people of color. I also toddled my first steps into a fraught zone between my white mother’s blue-blood, owning-class family and my white father’s hard-scrabble-farm Georgia roots. I channeled both my mother’s assumptions of superiority and my father’s urgent, resentful aspiration to rise. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

What is a passage or moment in the book that stays in your mind?
• Why is Wendy and Mary’s friendship unlikely? [or] What are some of the obstacles arrayed against Wendy and Mary’s becoming friends?
• What did Wendy have to learn in order to “see Mary more fully and become a more dependable friend?”
• What moments in the book showed Mary’s graciousness and patience with Wendy’s missteps coming through?
• Consider an interracial friendship in your life. Are there dynamics that you recognize from Mary and Wendy’s evolving relationship?
• This book is in part a grief memoir for Wendy’s mother; what other grief does the book evoke?
• What did you learn from Mary Norman’s experiences working in corrections? What does Mary’s humane approach to incarceration and rehabilitation reveal about the era of mass incarceration that began during her last years at the Correction Center?

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