Mary Williams, Jane Fonda’s “Lost Daughter”, Finds Hope
Interview with Mary Williams, Jane Fonda’s “Lost Daughter”
Interview by Marlise Karlin
Mary Williams, Jane Fonda’s adopted daughter, reveals how your past can stay with you, if you don’t find a way to reconnect the fractured bonds.
Marlise: You know you’ve lived at what some might say is the bottom of the ladder and then at the very top – and, as we know, they each can have their own set of challenges. So, let’s just start with your early childhood. Did you recognize the dangerous situations you were in as a child growing up in the Black Panther community? What it was like, and is that what created the anger that you carried for so long?
Mary Williams: It’s interesting a lot of the anger I carried actually had no connection to how I was raised. The Black Panthers were a very radical civil rights organization, but they took a more radical approach than Martin Luther King per se. They were actually into self-defense.
So Black Panthers carried guns and they used them when necessary. One of my earliest memories is being in the basement of a house while there was a gunfight going on upstairs. I probably wasn’t more than 3 or 4 years old, but I remember that moment and feeling like it was normal, partly because I was a child and partly because that’s what I was used to.
I recognized the Panthers as my family. Everybody was my brother. Everybody was my sister. And that’s kind of how I was raised from birth until I was about 10 years old.
