I’m ashamed to admit I bought a copy of Brit Bennett’s first book almost 4 years ago and still haven’t read it. I was tempted to pick it up before reading this one, but I got caught up with other stuff and Nerdette picked this one for their book club and here I am! This book was so good that I am even more motivated to go back and read The Mothers.
SPOILER ALERT!
Spoilers lurk beyond this point, so proceed with caution.
The Vanishing Half is really about leaving. The title refers to a black twin who’s light-skinned enough to pass for white, so she leaves her family so she can lead an easier life as a white woman in the era of Jim Crow. That’s one example of one person leaving her family, but it becomes a theme throughout the book.
The twins are identical and very close. When they’re young, a bunch of white men come to their house in the middle of the night to lynch their father and the girls witness it. He survives, but the men go to his hospital room to finish him off.
Their mother works her butt off to make ends meet, but it’s not enough. Before the girls have finished high school she tells them they’ll be leaving school to work full time. When Desiree, the impulsive one, suggests they run off together, she’s surprised when Stella, the practical one, agrees so willingly.
So they leave the small town of Mallard to seek their fortune in New Orleans. They get a job doing laundry, but when Stella gets fired for daydreaming and almost getting herself burned, Desiree suggests she pass as white to take a more lucrative office job. She’s resistant, but when the temp agency consistently comes up with nothing and rent is almost due, Stella gives in, applies for the job, and gets it. She’s hired to be an office assistant for some white dude, they fall in love, and when his job takes him to Boston, he asks her to go with him, so she does, her only goodbye to her sister a note saying she’s sorry. That’s cold.
Desiree goes the other direction and marries the darkest man she can find. They both get jobs working for the FBI in Washington DC and they have a daughter together. Then he turns abusive, and when he chokes Desiree, she decides enough is enough, so she takes her daughter and moves back in with her mother in Mallard. She gets a job as a waitress in a local diner, and she keeps telling her daughter, Jude, that it’s only temporary and they’ll move somewhere else soon, but they never do. It isn’t until Jude gets an athletic scholarship to UCLA that she gets out of town. She loves her mother and grandmother, but she still leaves them.
Desiree’s husband, Sam, hires a professional bounty hunter, Early, to find his wife and child, not realizing Early and Desiree had a thing when they were teenagers. So Early knows exactly where to find Desiree, but not only does he not turn her in, he tells Sam he can’t find her and throws him off her trail, and warns Desiree. She wonders if they should keep moving, but he convinces her she’s safe from Sam in Mallard.
She and Early start seeing each other, but due to the nature of his job, he’s out of town a lot and she’s never sure when he’ll be back – so he is repeatedly leaving her.
Meanwhile, Stella finds that, while passing has its perks, it also comes with its own set of challenges and stresses. We first meet White Stella at a homeowners association meeting in which she vehemently insists they can’t let a black family move into the neighborhood. Her insistence comes from her fear of discovery.
Although Stella becomes friends with Mrs. Walker, the matriarch of the black family, their friendship comes to an abrupt end when Mrs. Walker hears Stella’s daughter call her daughter a n—-er. Afterwards, Stella uses language about the family to her white friends that I think could best be described as microaggressions. In a time when we’re all talking about Karens, I found it interesting to watch this black woman transform herself into a Karen (although I understand at that time it was a “Miss Anne”). I guess the best way to convince the world you’re a white woman is to become the ultimate white woman.
Like her sister, Stella has one daughter, Kennedy, who does not understand her mother at all. Considering her mother has been lying to her for her whole life, can you blame her? She also ends up leaving after running into Jude, who finds out who she is and tells her everything. Kennedy also ends up leaving by running off to Europe to “find herself”, alerting her parents with nothing more than a postcard.
Stella does finally reunite with Desiree so she can tell Desiree to tell Jude to back off so she can have her daughter back. She thinks Jude chased Kennedy off, even though that’s not at all what happened. Stella made her own bed, she just doesn’t want to lie in it.
Stella is reunited with her family as her mother is dying from Alzheimer’s, so in a way, she has already started to leave them. Stella can’t stay with them. She has to go back to her white life, but she gives Early her engagement ring and tells him to sell it and use the money to pay for her mother’s care.
I thought it was interesting that, when Jude asked her mom where she thought Stella was, Desiree said she thought she was dead, because if she were still alive, Desiree would be able to feel her. I guess Stella had to die in a way so she could live in the world of white privilege.