Curiously, Stella is untraceable, despite Early’s detective skills. Stella vanished from the girls’ New Orleans apartment leaving nothing but a note: “ Sorry, honey, but I’ve got to go my own way.” In Mallard, Desiree searches for Stella with the help of a rekindled old flame, a bounty hunter named Early Jones. Mallard is at once repulsed and intrigued by this little girl, described as “blueblack” - “like she flown direct from Africa.” People in the town live by a strict color code: All are descendants of the mixed-race light-skinned man who founded the place “for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” In Mallard, “nobody married dark.”Īs Desiree settles back into her childhood home, she is haunted anew by her twin sister’s absence. News spreads fast, but the truth is more banal, and more heartbreaking, than the townspeople’s gossipy suppositions: The child is Desiree’s daughter, Jude, the product of an abusive marriage to a man in Washington, D.C.

Fourteen years later, Desiree returns home just as suddenly as she left, sans Stella but with a dark-skinned child in tow. Sixteen years old and already pressed into domestic service for a white family, the girls run away to New Orleans. In 1954, Desiree and Stella disappear from their home in tiny Mallard, La. Bennett asks: What is the cost, to an individual and to a community, of the passing person’s estrangement from family, friends, culture and identity - all sacrificed to maintain an assumed whiteness? What toll might such a decision take on those left behind in blackness? With great ambition, Bennett explores these questions through 20 years in the lives of twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, one of whom chooses to pass while the other does not. Brit Bennett’s new novel, “The Vanishing Half,” grapples with that American racial chimera known as passing for white.

The vanishing half a novel