Wendy Sanford grew up in an upper-middle-class white suburban family in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended private schools throughout her life. During the socially turbulent time of the 1970s, she became a feminist, a lesbian, and a Quaker. A founding member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Wendy coauthored and edited many versions of the women’s health and sexuality classic Our Bodies, Ourselves from 1973 to 2011. In seminary at Harvard Divinity School in the ’80s, she began to read works of women of color as “devotional reading,” to remedy her previous exclusive exposure to white and mostly male authors. She served for nearly a decade in campus ministry in the Boston area. In her fifties, she began reckon with her own white skin and the benefits that came to her through being white. In 2003, she earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She is grateful to Mary Norman for partnering with her to create this book. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with Polly Attwood, her spouse of forty-one years.

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.”