Shades of Difference

In 1848, Alphonse Decuir, a freed slave, inherited sugarcane fields from his white father. On those acres, Decuir wanted to build

[a] town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.

p5

This was the town of Mallard, so small it does not appear on atlases or maps, and our protagonists, the twins Desiree and Stella Vignes, are the great-great-great-granddaughters of Decuir. Decuir’s mother “hated” his lightness, but Decuir married a mulatto who was whiter than him,

he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.

p6

Like many other small town girls, the twins dream of more, or at least, Desiree does, and takes Stella along with her when they ‘escape’ to New Orleans. There they find menial jobs at first, but then Stella, in desperation for money, screws up her courage and goes for an interview at a company called Maison Blanche, to be a secretary. She is taken on because they assume she is white.

But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was. […] Sometimes she wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half.

p188

It is extremely interesting how Bennett puts it, that Stella had ‘become white’ – as if by default, a mixed race, even extremely light skinned person, is originally black. The process of passing is mysterious even for those like Stella who do it, and are left wondering how it happens – whether whiteness as an identity is simply a result of audience perception, or whether it is a trait carried within the person herself. Stella’s reflections show us it is not just a case of acting a part – though that is part of passing too. 

The novel examines the processes and costs of passing. Stella leaves her twin – and her mum and hometown – when she decides to pass as white by marrying her boss, Blake Sanders. She has to deny her original identity in order to be accepted in her new one. Marrying Sanders, Stella has a life of luxury, and a daughter, Kennedy, who is white with blonde hair and violet eyes. Stella lives as a white woman in a (upper-classed) white world, and when a black family wishes to move into her neighbourhood, she is so terrified she breaks her usual placid silence to object vigorously in the Neighbourhood Association. Not because Stella does not like black people, but because she is afraid of being recognised as black. This novel reiterates that it is easy for coloured people to pass and fool white people, but black people always know their own, apparently. Though some of the events in the story indicate this is not so, that even black people cannot always tell.  

Desiree chooses to marry a very dark-skinned man, and when he ‘beats on’ her, she takes her daughter, Jude, and flees back to Mallard and to her mum and old home. Her daughter, Jude looks nothing like Desiree, and takes after her father entirely, particularly in skin colour.

She was black. Blueblack. No, so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world.

p84

The novel then plays out the consequences of the twins’ different choices, and the collision of worlds when the two cousins, Jude Winston and Kennedy Sanders, meet. 

The issue is passing is explored well by Bennett.

Passing like this, from moment to moment, was funny. Heroic, even. Who didn’t want to get over on white folks for a change? But the passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse. Desiree only knew the failures: the ones who’d gotten homesick, or caught, or tired of pretending. But for all Desiree knew, Stella had lived white for half her life now, and maybe acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether. Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.

p69

Stella is terrified of being known to be mixed race, or black. The language used by Bennett is very telling.

The first time she’d ever been white, Stella couldn‘t wait to tell Desiree what she’d done

p257

‘been white’ – not pretended to be white, or tries to pass as white. Bennett’s novel seems to tell us that those who are mixed race but as light-coloured in skin tone as Stella, are passing if they choose to be identified as white. It is never clear why they aren’t passing if they choose to be identified as black.  Or to put it another way, why they are pretending if they assume their white identity, but not pretending if they assume their black identity. (Perhaps this has historical precedents, in the one-drop rule/law?) But what the novel does make clear is the lengths and depths to which a person who wishes to pass, needs to go to. Stella has to give up her entire past, family, other-identity, to live a life that lies by omission, and always be at risk of being exposed and having her husband leave her, and her life disintegrate. She has to live with such care that she can never let her guard down, resulting in relationships which can never be completely open and trusting. She also of course costs those who loved her, like her mother and twin, a huge price, though they had no say in the matter. Her daughter also pays some of this price, when she finds this skeleton in her mum’s closet.  

The Vanishing Half builds on previous novels on black people passing off as white, which date back to the 1920s with Nella Larsen’s Passing, which was also about 2 women who grew up very close as friends, then went their separate ways for a long period of time as one passed herself off as white, entering a different life with all its attendant white privileges, while the other stayed in the black community, and how they met and resumed their friendship many years later, but with tragic consequences. Curiously, the passing-focused novels seem mostly about women who pass; I am hard pressed to think of a novel about a man who passes. Bennett’s novel is a useful addition to this study on passing, but although I have absolutely no quibbles at all with the writing, which was for most part fluent and smooth, it was more about the issues than about the story. The focus was mainly on race and identity, and not much on the craftsmanship of storytelling or narrative. There were storylines that went nowhere in particular – most of the women protagonists’ boyfriends, in fact. Most of them – Desiree’s Early, Jude’s Renee, Kennedy’s Frantz – are actually lovely characters in their own right, but their presence does very little in the plot, or for the characters, or to further discussion of the race issue. But at least they are lovely characters – Stella’s husband, Blake, by comparison, was just a stock character, a complete cliché. Still, it was a good read, and if the author was focused on unpacking the complex identity issues of feelings of exclusion and non-belonging that are part of passing, she did this very well, successfully conveying the tension and stress of a Stella Vignes. 

For another take on this book, see Susan’s review