"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett
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The morning that Desiree Vignes came back, her hometown looked transformed — somehow unfamiliar. “A town always looked different once you’d returned,” she realized, “like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches.”
That’s where we begin in Brit Bennett’s terrific new novel: in the town of Mallard, La., in the late 1960s. It’s an odd, almost mythological place that Desiree has come home to at last, and that her twin sister, Stella, has fled for good.
The town was founded by the freed son of a white slaveholder and an enslaved woman — and the founder decides he’ll create a “third space” for people who are light-skinned — “each generation lighter than the one before” — even as he knows that lightness will be a “lonely gift.”
And it is for Stella Vignes, who escapes to New Orleans with her sister, and then disappears to a life in which she’ll pass for white.
Bennett says she heard about the place years ago from her mother and began to imagine a story that delves into colorism, the discrimination against darker-skinned people within communities of color.
At one point, Stella recalls how easy — at first — it was to "become" white. “...her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be?” It’s a particularly painful and complicated question in this summer of protests and police violence. Bennett, who has been quarantining in Brooklyn through the pandemic, never imagined as she conceived the novel several years ago, that it would land just as Americans confront the urgent cultural change she’s writing about.
My Thread Must-Read is Brit Bennett’s new novel, “The Vanishing Half.” You can hear my interview with Bennett later this month. — Kerri Miller | 