~ The Vanishing Half. By Brit Bennett ~
This year, especially, the profound overt and subtle effects of race on life in America have exploded into broad daylight. If it were possible, how many people would choose to be a different race, and what would be the costs and benefits of such a choice?
This is the question at the heart of the very topical The Vanishing Half. Stella and Desiree are twins who grow up in an unusual small town in Louisiana. Founded in 1848 by a freed slave, Mallard was
a town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. […] Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. […] He imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. Each generation lighter than the one before.
Stella and Desiree have ‘creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair’. Their father Leon ‘had been so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn his arm over to see the blue of his veins’.
But Leon’s fair skin does not protect him from being lynched by men who are angry that he underbids them in his woodworking business. His wife survives by cleaning houses, and when the girls turn 16, they join her for a year before running off to New Orleans, where they work illegally (being underage) in a laundry.
After a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.
Fourteen years later, Desiree returns with her daughter. While any prodigal daughter might be greeted with suspicion, it is heartbreaking to see how the town responds.
In Mallard, nobody married dark. Nobody left either, but Desiree had already done that. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.
“Lord”, Lou said. “I never seen a child that black before.”
Desiree had been a fingerprint expert for the FBI in DC, but back in Louisiana in the 60s, her experience is meaningless.
She’d finished [the fingerprint-reading test] quick, the deputy said, laughing a bit in amazement, might have been a record. But […] when he saw her address listed in Mallard, his gaze frosted over.
Desiree’s only option is to work in the local diner, and her darkskinned daughter Jude goes to school in Mallard — teased, harassed, or ignored by every other lightskinned child in the town.
And what of Stella? She has vanished entirely, erasing her history, her past and her family to marry a white man. She was always a quiet, methodical person, but the constant tension of being found out makes her intensely introverted all her life. Her own daughter, Kennedy, is a spoiled rich child, and they live in an upscale white gated community.
When a black family buys a house in the community, both overt and latent racism explode. Stella joins in, petrified that her own secret will somehow emerge.
A colored family moving across the street. Would they see her for what she was? Or rather, what she wasn’t?
The room quieted when Stella Sanders climbed to her feet.
“You must stop them, Percy,” she said. “If you don’t, there’ll be more and then what? Enough is enough.”
Years later, Jude and Kennedy meet in a slightly contrived deus ex machina. The novel flags somewhat here by focusing on whether Jude will meet Stella, which seems largely uninteresting by this point. Jude, however, is a lovely character: deeply scarred by her absent father’s brutality and by the explicit racism she faced growing up, she is socially insecure, but has an abiding, accepting love for her white boyfriend Reese. More than a simple foil, Reese is a fully-fleshed out character whose transsexuality adds weight and complexity to the novel.
Desiree gets short shrift in the second half of the novel. Does she ever regret her choice to move back to Mallard, which has bound her to a life of poverty and exposed her daughter to Mallard’s racism?
The writing is straightforward, and the thoughts of the characters are laid out clearly. The strength of this novel lies in what it says about the larger world reflected in the lives of the characters. This a book to be read for its insights into race and identity, internalized and externalized, in America.
For another take on this book, see Lisa’s review
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