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Britt Bennett’s recent novel, The Vanishing Half, deals in multiplicative identities. The Vanishing Half is Bennett’s follow up to her debut novel, The Mothers (Read my review here), which similarly dwells on how explosive secrets can tear families and communities asunder. The novel begins with sixteen-year old twins, Desiree and Stella, who flee their tiny hometown for New Orleans, looking for a way to escape their bleak situation at home. But the real drama is not this first vanishing, but a second, when Stella abandons her twin sister, moving to a new city with her wealthy white boss and future husband. The catch is that Stella has “become” white, no one that she works with, including her boss, knows that she is a light-skinned black woman. Stella adopts this new white identity, which for her is a ticket out of all the strife she experienced in her young life as a black girl, and thus the twin’s lives are severed in two.
The twins grow up in Mallard, a small town in Lousiana that can’t be found on a map, a town built on the racist principle that lighter skin is superior to dark skin. In this town populated only by light-skinned black families, the twins experience the oppressive effects that colorism can have on a population. And as it happens, their light skin offers them no protection from violent racism. As young girls, Stella and Desiree watch their father dragged out of their home and lynched by a white mob, a harsh reminder that prejudice can find you anywhere. At the outset of the novel, now fourteen years after the girls had disappeared from home, Desiree returns to Mallard with her eight year old daughter, a “blueblack” girl who draws stares from many of the townspeople. Desiree is fleeing a domestic violence situation: her husband, a man with inky black skin, a man who once seemed so charming, has become violent towards Desiree. She escapes her marriage, bringing along Jude, the daughter whose complexion is so reminiscent of her father’s. Jude faces a staggering amount of prejudice in Mallard, where classmates lambast her with racial slurs and townspeople treat her as subhuman, somehow not the product of her light-skinned and beautiful mother.
As Desiree slowly adjusts to life in Mallard, taking a job busing tables in the local diner to support her aging mother and young daughter, she can’t help but wonder what has become of her sister Stella, whom she has not heard from since her disappearance from New Orleans. Stella is living across the country in Burbank, California, a rich housewife in an exclusive suburb with her banker husband and blonde young daughter. As far as appearances go, Stella resembles any other wealthy white woman in her neighborhood, but inside she is tortured by the possibility of her secret identity being discovered. When a black family moves across the street, Stella is complicit in the neighborhood’s racist rejection and insidious gossip-mongering toward these people, terrified that her neighbors could find out that she is one of them, but even more terrified that her black neighbors might recognize her for the fraud she is.
Stella’s defensiveness surrounding her personal history and identity creates distance between Stella and her daughter, Kennedy, a rebellious privileged white girl who feels slighted by her mother’s distant nature. Stella’s secret becomes toxic to everyone involved—Desiree is wounded by her sister’s betrayal, Kennedy senses her mother’s aloof nature and perceives it as a lack of love, and of course Stella is consumed by the secret from the inside out. Of course, Stella’s secret can only be kept for so long, and when Kennedy and Jude run into each other in California, the family history begins to unravel, and Stella and Desiree are forced to confront their severed identities. The Vanishing Half is a multigenerational tale of hurt, loss, and the pain of not belonging.
Bennett’s novel is grounded in a long tradition of black art that addresses appearance and social acceptance. The Vanishing Half feels like a modern addendum to Toni Morrison’s classic novel The Bluest Eye, which deals with issues of image and racist beauty standards, told through the eyes of a young black girl. The Vanishing Half also specifically speaks to the phenomena of fluid racial identity and what it means to occupy multiple identities, issues explored almost a century earlier in Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing. Bennett’s novel spans about three decades, nodding to the long history of black women who were forced to grapples with their identities and find creative methods to transcend society’s oppressive expectations of them. Bennett has crafted a well-paced and compelling narrative that digs at the roots of what it means to try to survive as a black woman in America. She explores the multifaceted and transmutable nature of identity, and with magnificent prose she exposes harsh truths about society’s toxic obsession with appearances.