Summary

This story consists of a series of letters, primarily those that passes between Dr. Lucinda Johnson, who is a psychiatrist, and Monica Willis, who has a PhD in education. The letters concern the difficult, confrontational relationship between Dr. Johnson’s daughter Christinia, and Dr. Willis’s daughter Fatima who, as the letters reveal, have a history of teasing and perhaps even bullying each other.

The two mothers simultaneously defend their own daughters and accuse the other girl of being the cause of the tension in the relationship. Eventually, as letters go back and forth over a period of almost a month, that tension spills over into the correspondence relationship between the two mothers. They each accuse each other of infidelity, of being poorly educated, and of being disloyal to their shared experiences of being black people in a mostly white community – and, more...