The Vanishing Half: is a tale of glorious characterisation, of sisters separated by their choices and their race

What is this about?

Stella and Desiree are twins, born in Mallard, Louisiana in a town for Negros who would never be white, but don’t want to be treated as Negroes either because of the colour of their skin. When they watch their father lynched by white men, it changes in them in ways the other doesn’t entirely realise, and so begins their separation after a lifetime of being twins, and inseparable from one other. The story follows them through the choices they make, and how those choices affect their children.

What else is this about?

The Vanishing Half is an exceptional read, filled with some captivating characterisation, and the choices Stella and Desiree make for themselves, and how these choices affect their children.

Blurb

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

In answer to my question posed here in this #5Books post when I mused about The Vanishing Half is about, the answer is: it’s damned spectacular.

Stella and Desiree

Stella and Desiree are twins, and inseparable growing up. But when they are witness to their father’s lynching by white men, the girls begin to change in different ways, though neither realises just how much. When they are sixteen they run away from Mallard to New Orleans.

Desiree is desperate for their freedom, while Stella seems to go along with her because Desiree wants to go.

Passing used to be a trick they play, like going into museum on a day that isn’t Negro Day. But, it becomes a choice and a necessity when Stella passes as white to get a job, to earn the money they need to avoid having to go back home to Mallard. Except, passing is something Stella chooses in the end when she leaves Desiree and never looks back.

The Vanishing Half is a story of sisters who seem to want different things, but each is seeking a kind of security. Desiree doesn’t want to live her life in Mallard, wants to be more than what that town expects of her. She learns how to study fingerprints, where she meets her husband, Sam and for a time she thinks she’s found what she’s seeking.

But Stella wants a the security that comes with being white — the money, the simple safety that comes with having white skin, with a white husband who has a good job so you don’t have to go hungry.

But when Sam hits Desiree, and it reaches a point when she knows she has to leave him, it’s to Mallard that she returns, with a daughter, Jude, in tow. Everything the people remember of her return is that her daughter’s skin was so dark, and that she couldn’t be Desiree’s daughter. There she builds a life for herself, finds love with Early,  a man Sam hired to find her, and even makes her peace with a mother, a woman hardened by everything she has endured, including her daughters running away from her.

Her daughter’s so very dark skin, unlike her mother and other people in the town, ostracises her in the town in a way, until she escapes to LA, and falls in love with Reese. He is trans, and figuring out his own identity as much as Jude is — away from her mother, Mallard and everything she was there.

The book introduces us to Desiree first, following her choices over years until Jude is ready to leave for LA, and school there. In LA, she meets Reese and builds a life for herself, and begins to want to find Stella.

When Stella’s part begins, she is part of the nice, white crowd. The kind that live together nicely in their friendly neighbourhood, where kids are friends, where couples meet and chat on their front porch.

But when a black couple buys a house and wants to move into their neighbourhood, Stella is the first to speak up and insist that something be done to stop this from happening, because where will it stop?

Their appearance terrifies her because she is afraid of being found out. Stella has honed her skill of acting white, of saying all the right things so she fits in with a bunch of nice white people in a nice white neighbourhood. 

Except, she is acting — so what does that say about race, and what we’ve constructed and expect from a person who calls himself or herself white?

When Reginald and Loretta Walker, the black couple and their daughter, move into their neighbourhood, Stella is ever the perfect white neighbour — keeping her daughter from being too friendly with the Walker’s daughter, and nodding politely (eventually) from across the street until finally her fear of being found out forces her into action — she becomes Loretta’s friend — but not in the presence of the other white people she socialises with. Ironically though, with Loretta, she finally finds a part of herself that she had pushed deep down and away from the white woman she wanted to be. Stella never realised what she would lose when she chose to become white. 

Jude and Kennedy

While Stella and Desiree lead different lives, their daughters are far removed from what they wanted for them  — though the mothers never quite realise, or understand it. Jude works hard to help Reese transition, while Kennedy leaves the safety of her parents, of the security of college and tries to become an actress.

Jude scrimps and saves, and works several jobs at once to help Reese, while Kennedy is given a Camaro and an apartment by her parents as a year-long bribe to help her try and become an actress while all the while hoping she’ll see the error of her ways and return to college.

It’s interesting, because I see parts of Desiree in the beginning of this book, in her desperation to leave Mallard behind in Kennedy, and in Jude I see Stella’s desire for security, though Jude makes her own way in the world, eventually to medical school. That strength though, for everything she goes through, I can’t help but see it in Stella too. However, whereas Stella gave up so much to be white, Jude, with her dark skin, earned everything she got.

The daughters meet much to Stella’s anger and horror, and over the years continue to have a (phone) relationship that neither Desiree nor Stella ever realise. But, their initial meeting also forces Stella to return home to ask Desiree to stop Jude from contacting Kennedy, and faces everything and everyone she gave up, and that too is filled with anger and more than a little tears.

The reunion is less important (emotional? I’m not sure) than i thought it would be because they may always look alike but the closeness, their intertwining of everything that comes with being twins has severed because of the choices they made. 

The men in this story are in the background — Early who saves Desiree from being found by her abusive husband, Sam. For much of the book comes his work as a bounty hunter keeps from having too much of a physical presence in their lives, but he’s always there. Blake, Stella’s husband, is a ghost in the book, his presence barely a blip for me. Don’t get me wrong, he loved Stella, but she was always unknowable to him in some ways. And, he seemed content with her playing the role of dutiful wife like she should to ever wonder about the things she wanted from life.

The women in The Vanishing Half propel this story — their needs, wants, fears and desperation. They are different, flawed and unknowable to each other in some ways. But without a doubt, The Vanishing Half is going to be one of the most thought-provoking and compelling things you read this year.