Behind Picket Fences

Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood

Behind Picket Fences is the story of how four families deal with their trials and triumphs. Sharing the same neighborhood, even spending time together, no family knows the truth about the difficulties the others face. On the outside, Sidra and Farris have the biggest house and the most expensive cars. What no one else sees, is their struggle with infertility. If their dreams do not change to compensate for the blows of fate, their unfulfilled life may lead to deception. Mariam and Morgan's modest home exudes the rich scent of family. With children playing in the yard, they seem picture perfect. But financial struggle is their continuous battle, and their only solution may give birth to an envy which is more destructive than hunger. Summer and Porter enjoy youth and the freedom of self-employment. But discontentment and mental instability linger between them. If they are not able to build a bridge over the gap, their search for happiness may have a fatal end. May and Hasan enjoy peace and true happiness. Illness cares not, however, of letting them relish in their blessings. Only patience and time will prove if this unwelcome visitor is simply passing by, or if it will tear their world apart. An honest portrayal of love and family, Behind Picket Fences opens our eyes to the difficult truths hidden behind smiling faces.

A Gentle Invitation into the Challenging Topic of Privilege The notion that some might have it better than others, for no good reason, offends our sensibilities. Yet, until we talk about privilege, we’ll never fully understand it or find our way forward. Amy Julia Becker welcomes us into her life, from the charm of her privileged southern childhood to her adult experience in the northeast, and the denials she has faced as the mother of a child with special needs. She shows how a life behind a white picket fence can restrict even as it protects, and how it can prevent us from loving our neighbors well. White Picket Fences invites us to respond to privilege with generosity, humility, and hope. It opens us to questions we are afraid to ask, so that we can walk further from fear and closer to love, in all its fragile and mysterious possibilities.

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in “Groveland,” a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal. Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.

Stunning photos accentuate the charm of this Panhandle town. Seaside, the most successfully planned city of recent years, requires picket fences. Each must be of a different design.

Sloane Sawyer had it all planned--she and her best friend Stephie would graduate from high school, get out of Tippett Valley and have dazzling complementary careers. Sloane would become an award-winning graphic designer, creating band posters using Stephie's artwork. She would also have a loving husband, the requisite two kids and a house with a white picket fence. As she turns thirty, Sloane has a boring job and a boss who ignores her. She has no children, doesn't own a house, has gained fifteen pounds and questions how her video game-playing husband could possibly love her. And Stephie, working in a bar and living in Tippett Valley with the disreputable Randy, is increasingly distant. Even as Sloane clings to her dream, she comes to realize that she and Stephie won't be able to move forward until they finally confront an old tragedy.

When her black sheep brother disappears, Amanda Janvier eagerly takes in her sixteen year-old niece Tally. The girl is practically an orphan: motherless, and living with a father who raises Tally wherever he lands– in a Buick, a pizza joint, a horse farm–and regularly takes off on wild schemes. Amanda envisions that she, her husband Neil, and their two teenagers can offer the girl stability and a shot at a “normal” life, even though their own storybook lives are about to crumble. Seventeen-year-old Chase Janvier hasn’t seen his cousin in years, and other than a vague curiosity about her strange life, he doesn’t expect her arrival will affect him much–or interfere with his growing, disturbing interest in a long-ago house fire that plagues his dreams unbeknownst to anyone else. Tally and Chase bond as they interview two Holocaust survivors for a sociology project, and become startlingly aware that the whole family is grappling with hidden secrets, with the echoes of the past, and with the realization that ignoring tragic situations won’t make them go away. Will Tally’s presence blow apart their carefully-constructed world, knocking down the illusion of the white picket fence and reveal a hidden past that could destroy them all–or can she help them find the truth without losing each other?

Finnoula O'Grady had never had a home... Growing up in foster care, Finn had spent her childhood longing for a little house with a white picket fence. Years later her dreams came true when she inherited the rundown March Winds. But someone else was in love with her house-young Emma, the lonely niece of her next-door neighbor Cade McDaniel. Cade knew nothing about being a single parent. The only love and caring he'd ever done were for the old houses he restored for a living. But there was no denying that Finn's arrival had him feeling decidedly more human than usual. And when Emma finds a child's 150-year-old diary, they unearth a story that brings the three wounded souls together and begins to change March Winds from just a house... into a home.