The Vanishing Half Book Review By: Paloma Lenz

the-vanishing-half-book-review-epifania-magazine

 

Brit Bennett tackles colorism, trauma, and secrets in her latest novel, The Vanishing Half.

At sixteen, the Vigness twins, Stella and Desiree, decide to leave home. Mallard, their hometown, is a peculiar, off-the-map kind of place in rural Louisiana. By design, the population is made up of light-skinned African American families. Mallard’s founders intended it to be a place apart from that of larger cities like New Orleans, and its residents intentionally chose partners that would provide them with lighter-skinned generations going forward. As you can expect, the lighter one’s skin in Mallard, the more regard and respect is given.

The story of the Vigness sisters’ disappearance is set in 1960s Louisiana and begins with the retelling of the return of Desiree over a decade later. She returns to Mallard sans Stella, but with a dark-skinned daughter, Jude, at her side. Seeing as the town is obsessed with skin color, rumors spread about Desiree and her daughter, the missing husband/father, and the whereabouts of her twin sister. Growing up as a dark-skinned black girl, in a small town like Mallard, causes a large amount of trauma for Jude who endures bullying by her peers, taunting from boys, and a resulting negative self-image.

Before Desiree’s return, she and Stella had managed a small, but hopeful life in Opelousas and Stella had even managed to land a job as a secretary. However, unbeknownst to Desiree, Stella had achieved the position by passing as a white woman. From the point of hire, Stella – who has yearned for a secret of her own, apart from her twin sister – doesn’t share this part with Desiree. Instead, she chooses to live her life as both a white woman at work and a light-skinned black woman everywhere else. Eventually, Stella chooses to pursue her “passing” life in full and completely disappears on her sister from one day to the next. Desiree is devastated by Stella’s disappearance and spends many years attempting to trace her steps.

The novel explores how traumatic experiences affect individuals differently. As very young girls, Stella and Desiree witnessed the lynching of their father by white men. Dragged from his house in the middle of the night, their father Leon was brutally attacked after being falsely accused of harassing a white woman. This trauma is a constant theme throughout the telling of Stella’s story. As she pursues her new life as a white woman living in suburban Los Angeles, the threat of white people’s power to destroy her life and end it, is constant. But she refuses to return to her old life in Mallard, so much that when the truth of her origins is revealed to her daughter, Kennedy, she almost loses her to maintain her finely constructed lie.

The story reads like a Toni Morrison novel. The themes of racial violence and trauma are woven cleverly throughout the novel. Bennet provides different perspectives on trauma in addition to that experienced by the Vigness sisters. Characters like Reese, a black, transgender man from the Midwest, provide an even broader scope on the book’s theme. And much like Morrison’s writing, Bennett’s novel spans over three decades, but moves forward fluidly and is ripe with beautiful imagery and heavy metaphors.

Seeing as colorism within the black and Latinx communities is an ongoing and very current topic, exploring how trauma and colorism affect the individual psyche makes Bennett’s latest novel a very timely and captivating read.