The Vanishing Half: A Novel

“Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift […] He imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.” 

Like the preceding quote, this one emphasizes the elite nature of being of mixed race. The founder’s choice of the word “perfect” to describe his light-skinned progeny reinforces the prejudice that will become a common belief among the villagers. Jude will later be condemned as flawed because of her dark skin. 

“Negroes always love our hometowns […] Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.” 

Desiree’s husband Sam makes this sweeping observation even though Desiree has already expressed a hatred for Mallard. Ironically, she will return to her hometown, just as her husband’s comment suggests. However, Stella exhibits a White person’s contempt for home, proving that attitude isn’t dictated by race.

“As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way.” 

This comment is expressed from Desiree’s perspective as she ponders the difference between herself and her twin. The statement is one of many that will be made in the book about the distinction between physical likeness and personal identity. Stella will later make similar observations as her life path diverges sharply from Desiree’s.

“A dark man would trample her beauty. He’d love it at first but like anything he desired and could never attain, he would soon grow to resent it. Now he was punishing her for it.” 

Adele warns Desiree not to marry a dark-skinned man. Her observation becomes prophetic when Sam begins beating Desiree. His prejudice is the reverse of that held by Mallard residents. To Sam, lightness is a source of attraction and bitter envy. To the Mallard villagers, darkness is a source of fear and suspicion.

“This was how Desiree thought of herself then: the single dynamic force in Stella’s life, a gust of wind strong enough to rip out her roots. This was the story Desiree needed to tell herself and Stella allowed her to. They both felt safe inside it.” 

As teenagers, Desiree and Stella have formed a joint identity. Desiree is the leader, and Stella is the follower. When Stella leaves, Desiree is forced to reevaluate her entire identity as it relates to her sister. She realizes that it is possible to be a twin without the least notion of her sister’s inner life. 

“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.” 

Jude makes this observation because she has always felt singled out on account of her skin tone, which has isolated her within the Mallard community. This experience differs dramatically from that of her mother. Desiree has always been part of a twin package. She has never felt distinct, nor did she ever want to be seen as separate from Stella. 

“She couldn’t imagine living like this—hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.” 

Jude reflects here while catering an event in a rich home, not realizing that she will meet Stella in this exposed house. She is unaware of the irony of her statement: Stella is now rich, but all she does is hide. 

“Foolish to pretend that she hadn’t chosen this city. She wasn’t some little tugboat, drifting along with the tide. She had created herself. Since the morning she’d walked out of the Maison Blanche building a white girl, she had decided everything.” 

As a child, Stella defined herself as the passive twin in relation to Desiree. As an adult, she seems to be struggling with this same view of herself. Only now, as a middle-aged woman, does she seem willing to admit that she has been a free agent in creating her life. 

“The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.”

Stella is contemplating the assassinations of 1968 and comparing them to the murder of her father. The offhanded way in which her father was killed had a major effect on her psyche. One might speculate that her decision to pass as White was a way of staving off any future similar atrocity in her personal experience. 

“But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.” 

Stella’s observation points out the fact that race is an artificial construct. She doesn’t look like a Black woman, yet she is labeled one because of her origins. The moment she refuses to carry that identity forward, she ceases to be Black in the eyes of others. 

“How did I become me and you become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked.” 

Just as Stella ponders racial identity in the preceding comment, here she ponders personality. This, too, can be an artificial construct. Stella’s behavior as a child is developed in counterpoint to Desiree’s. Without her twin, Stella seems to be asking who she might really be. 

“Yes, but acting is different […] You only show people what you want to.” 

Kennedy is explaining to Jude that acting allows you to conceal what you don’t want people to see. At the time she makes this comment, neither girl is aware of Stella’s lifelong performance. Since she began passing for White, Stella has never shown anyone all that she is. 

“‘No, your mother’s crazy. She’s been lying to you your whole life.’ She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, but by then, it was too late. She had rung the bell, and all her life, the note would hang in the air.” 

Kennedy provokes Jude into blurting out the truth about Stella’s identity. Many characters in the novel carry secrets to the grave. In this instance, Jude wishes she had done exactly that. She can’t retract the revelation that will change Kennedy’s relationship with her mother forever.

“A secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one. She had shared everything with Desiree. She wanted something of her own.” 

Stella is thinking about the first time she passed for White but failed to tell Desiree about the experience. Stella’s need to withhold the truth offers an additional rationale for her decision to spend the rest of her life in the White world. She is motivated by the need to create a distinct set of experiences that are different from Desiree’s. 

“But sometimes lying was an act of love. Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become.” 

Stella chooses to conceal the truth from Blake and Kennedy because she believes she is protecting them. One lie leads to another such that the substance of Stella’s White existence has been a fabrication. She has constructed a persona rather than an identity since nothing remains of her but a mountain of lies. 

“She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women—each real, each a lie.” 

Stella is contemplating telling Kennedy her life story. However, she realizes that doing so won’t reveal her identity to her daughter. Stella doesn’t have a single identity. She has two, but neither one feels authentic to her. 

“She would see it in the faces of other blacks, some sort of connection. But she felt nothing. She glanced at them across the subway car with the vague disinterest of a stranger.” 

Kennedy has recently learned about her Black heritage, but it makes no difference in terms of her identity. Her comment suggests that racial identity is never more than skin keep. Kennedy looks White and identifies as White. She feels no kinship toward Black people simply because she shares a fragment of her biology with them. 

“But her mother was barely focusing on her. She paused in the middle of the shop floor, fingering the lacy sleeves of a black gown. ‘I love shopping,’ she’d said, almost to herself. ‘It’s like trying on all the other people you could be.’” 

Kennedy recalls a telling memory about her mother. Stella is fascinated by shopping because it presents a multitude of alternate personas. She regards identity as something that can be put on and taken off like a stage costume. Stella’s life is in some ways a piece of performance art. 

“It wasn’t a race thing. She just hated the idea of anyone telling her who she had to be. She was like her mother in that way. If she’d been born black, she would have been perfectly happy about it. But she wasn’t and who was Jude to tell her that she was somebody that she was not? Nothing had changed, really.” 

Kennedy rebels at the way that Jude defines her. She consciously draws a parallel with Stella’s rebellion at being defined as half of Desiree. Both women want to decide for themselves who they are in a world that tries to pigeonhole them. 

“Went to find myself, she wrote. I’m safe. Don’t worry about me. The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.” 

When Kennedy goes away to find herself, Stella is offended by her daughter’s choice of words. Even though Stella talks about the deliberate construction of an identity, she has failed to create a coherent identity for herself. In her darker moments, she views her own life as a mountain of lies. 

“But what was different, exactly? A sister easier to shed than a daughter, a mother than a husband. What made her so easy to give away?” 

Once Stella returns home, Desiree is offended by her twin’s willingness to sacrifice the Black Vignes family in favor of the White Sanders family. She takes the rejection personally, assuming that she is less valuable to Stella than Kennedy and Blake are. Desiree fails to see that Stella needed to shed her identity as a twin to protect her own psyche. 

“She’d always felt like the older sister, even though she only was by a matter of minutes. But maybe in those seven minutes they’d first been apart, they’d each lived a lifetime, setting out on their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be.” 

Desiree contemplates the difference in her birth time between her and her sibling. She has always viewed the two as a unit and blames Stella for shattering their shared identity. With this observation, she finally comes to understand that physical similarity is meaningless in this regard. Free will is all that matters. 

“People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable. Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died.” 

Jude is contemplating a cadaver during her medical school training. While she is talking about clinical observation, her comment speaks volumes about the nature of identity. Stella continues to be a mystery to herself. Many secrets of her life will never be revealed to her family until after she is dead.