Britt Bennett - Blog Posts
THE VANISHING HALF by BRIT BENNETT (REVIEW)
quickly: a set of twins go missing from their small town, one returns, one does not (sister vs. sister and mother vs. daughter / displaced people finding placement / people that drink sweet tea / towns so small they disappear on maps / racist homeowner's associations / the weight and lineage of skin color / taking risks and making changes).
twin sisters grow tired of their life in small town Louisianna, and go looking for their future in New Orleans. tragedy has bonded them into a single being, but after leaving home, one story becomes split between two different lives. moving through the 60’s 70’s and 80’s, we see the lives of three generations of women, though the story is anchored by the twins. one twin passes for white, opening the world up beyond her wildest dreams (and nightmares). the other twin falls in love with a man darker than her, in skin tone and in spirit, coincidentally, and the world seems to close shut around her. time conspires with lineage, and eventually reveals the consequences of each of their decisions.
★ ★ ★ ★
more thoughts: SPOILERS!
Some personal thoughts… I picked this book for a friend’s summer booklist. (It was full of non-fiction, which is cool, but fiction has been allowing me to wrap my mind around things in a different way.) We watched the Netflix film Passing a few years ago, so I thought this book would be an interesting conversation extender; looking at the same topic from a different angle and a different medium.
I picked the book up to preview the first chapter. (We weren’t scheduled to read this together for a few weeks.) Before I knew it, I was swept into the story. I finished it in two days.
We open in the far past, a single mother is raising a set of twins in a small Louisianna town, Mallard, which is occupied by light-skinned black people. It was founded by a light-skinned man who had some lofty idea for a town of people who weren’t white but were better than the other blacks. His great-great-great granddaughters, the twins, Desiree and Stella, would soon arrive to the world and embody this colorist struggle.
After the twins witness the lynching of their father, sealing them in a bond of shared trauma, their mother begins to depend on them to help earn money for the family. As soon as they are old enough, they are taken out of school and sent to work in the home of a wealthy white couple. This dashes the dreams of both twins, who dread ending up like their mother. While under employ by the wealthy couple, they are overworked and one of the twins is sexually abused. It is then that they make plans to run away to New Orleans.
In New Orleans, new circumstances give each of the twins new opportunities to ‘unlock’ new aspects of themselves. After passing for white to get a new job, Stella becomes swept with the chance to live a life of ease and acceptance. She is a young secretary for an older boss, and soon becomes his wife, and mother of his ‘white child’. They live in Los Angeles. Her personality is a shell, but she has all the material things she could need. Including her morning cocktails in the backyard pool.
Meanwhile, Desiree is working for the FBI in D.C., married to a man who hits her whenever the wind blows. After one too many beatings, Desiree decides to run away home to Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter. The flat circle of time begins to curl back towards the beginning. Fast forward past the bounty hunter her husband sends after her, said bounty hunter falling in love with her, her daughter Jude growing up alienated in a ‘light-skins only’ town, and Jude receiving a scholarship and moving to go to a school in Los Angeles.
It is in Los Angeles that Jude finds love, an affirmation after years of being deemed socially ‘ugly’. By chance, she also finds her long-lost cousin, Stella’s daughter, Kennedy. We learn that Kennedy grew up with a hollow mother who never revealed anything significant about herself. A mother who fought to keep a black family out of the neighborhood, but then secretly befriends them. A mother who introduced her to the ’n-word’, and then slapped her for using it. A mother who couldn’t be truthful if she tried… living in a completely different reality that she won’t allow to be deconstructed.
Conflicts arise between Jude and Kennedy, as she tries to get Kennedy to see who her mother really is. Conflicts arise between Stella and Desiree, miles away, as Stella believes Desiree can keep Jude from shattering Stella’s reality. Conflicts arise within each of the characters, trying to understand the motives of every other person and the world they’ve built around themselves.
The climax and the resolution walk each other to the last pages. After one final reunion, each of the twin sisters makes peace with the decisions they have made. Somehow, we end with Jude and her boyfriend swimming naked in a river. A metaphor for living in your truth?
A fantastic world. It’s always nice to take a trip down South. A full four stars. If this were a wine, I would say I’d like for it to have a little more body, a little more time to let the bottle age in a dark basement. Yet, I am in love with the author’s tone and voice, and can’t wait to see what else she puts to print.