Desiree meets a man too, but he has a tendency to mix adoration and abuse. There, Stella meets a man and presents herself as white, until this identity becomes a full-time performance. Stella and Desiree grow up inseparable until they run away to New Orleans: in search of something more, in search of something better.
Stella is a sister in this town, not only a sister, a twin. Stella was raised in a small town called Mallard, a town in which “each generation lighter than the one before.” The residents teetering between Black and white their racial identity defined as “ light-skinned African Americans.” If one were to leave the town, however, they may have the freedom to choose their own. In other words, our identity, and how it is individually shaped. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s second novel, explores the very question of being and belonging. Vanished, Stella’s secret still lingering on her tongue. The movers would shut the hatch and the Walkers would leave.
The white neighbours peering through the blinds of their homes they would never be coerced from, and Stella peering with them. She watches, in real-time, Loretta’s “white fur rug” and “furniture covered in gold” relayed into the moving truck. “But it’s not,” Stella tries to reason, “none of it belongs to me,” and she doesn’t have to imagine the cardboard boxes being carried from the house. She wants to believe the life she chose was shaped by something else. She wants to believe her privilege wasn’t of her own doing. Maybe Loretta had known, maybe she was indifferent. “It’s your life,” Loretta would continue, shrugging off her secret.
That, after all this time, Stella is coloured too. That if Loretta were to peel back her facade like the skin of an apple, she would see their cores fell from a similar tree. Stella knows that, despite her prejudice against Loretta’s Black family moving into her white neighbourhood, there isn’t much difference between them and herself. Opening the formidable stage curtains to a platform unknown. What Stella is imagining is revealing who she really is. As if ready to receive applause for how convincingly she played her role.
Standing in Loretta’s living room, stage lights shining on her face. She imagines marching across the street, gaining confidence with each step. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” is what Stella Vignes imagines Loretta Walker would say.
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