In time mother and daughter become friendly with the Walkers and their child across the way. No one, including her husband, knows that she is black.
Stella floats in her swimming pool, sipping on a gin and soda, secure in her secret. They eventually buy a house across the street from Stella and her husband. By turns poignant and funny, it’s a timely look at the dual nature of race - an abstract construct, a visceral reality - and the damage that racism can inflict.One day, in 1968, a time when the country is changing every day, Stella sits in on a homeowners meeting where residents are outraged at the thought of a black family, the Walkers, moving in. The Vanishing Half is skillfully structured and filled with richly developed characters who defy stereotypes. It will take her years, as she finishes college and enters medical school, to connect first to Kennedy, who is pursuing an acting career, and finally to Stella.
They’re both disguised, he as a “golden brown" cowboy, although she’ll learn as they fall in love that his disguise is more complex than she knew.ĭuring a side gig with a caterer, Jude is reluctantly serving a drink to a snotty violet-eyed teenager when a woman who is the image of Desiree walks into the party and shocks her down to her soul. Quiet, stoic Jude, who has endured countless racist taunts from her light-skinned classmates in Mallard, earns a track scholarship to UCLA and departs for Los Angeles. In the book’s second half, Bennett moves to the lives of the twins’ daughters. For a while they glory in their new independence together, but one day Stella simply disappears, leaving her sister and mother heartbroken. In 1954, tired of small-town life, 16-year-olds Desiree and Stella run away to New Orleans. The twins are so close they sometimes feel like they’re one person.
She especially dislikes Early Jones, a darker-skinned boy from out of town with whom Desiree has a brief but intense flirtation. The twins grow into teenagers with “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” pretty enough to keep their no-nonsense mother, Adele, busy chasing off boys. Their gentle father, Leon, is for trumped-up reasons “lynched twice” - shot four times by a gang of white men in his home, he survives, only to have the men enter the hospital where he’s being treated and kill him in his bed. By 1938, when an Irish priest is sent to minister to the town, he can’t figure out why its “fair and blonde and redheaded” people are considered black: “Was this who counted for colored in America, who whites wanted to keep separate? Well, how could they ever tell the difference?”īut they can, and that point is made with brutal force to Stella and Desiree Vignes when they’re tiny girls, in the mid-1940s. All of the inhabitants of Mallard ― so tiny and remote it doesn’t appear on maps - follow suit down through the generations.
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