The Vanishing Half

“How’d she’d pretended to be someone else because she needed a job, and after a while, pretending became reality. 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.”

Almost all of my homegirls (including my own mama) told me to read this book. I found out about it after Brit Bennet did an hour plus long conversation on Nella Larsen’s Passing. I was looking for more after my third read of the novella left me with even more questions than the previous two. After years of my best friend (with whom I share some of the exact same titles in our favorite books) telling me about its greatness, I finally got to it. After wrestling the hardest read of my not so young life into submission (I’m looking at you Paradise), I needed a break from the classics. However, I think I just read a modern classic instead.

What had happened was…

The novel begins in Mallard, Louisiana; a tiny Black town in the boot that prides itself in it’s lightly complected residents. Two twin sisters, Stella and Desiree, experience the racialized violence of the American south in the 1940’s which sets them on very different paths. After their father was lynched in front of them, the twins had to start working to support their now small family. Eventually answering the call of the big city, New Orleans, the sisters run away. Disappearing from their small town. They struggle greatly until Stella finds a job by passing as a white woman. Her boss falls head over heals for her and the next thing Desiree knows her sister has run away from her too. Disappearing from her life.

Desiree finds her way to D.C., where she married a man like the city itself, chocolate. Unfortunately, this man was not as sweet as his complexion would have suggested. Eventually Desiree is able to escape the domestic violence cycle with their child and return to Mallard. However, returning to a town that prides itself in a legacy of passe blanc residents is complicated by their hatred of any daughter who inherited her father’s rich skin tone. It was Desiree’s intent to just pass through such a town; however her daughter Jude grows up alienated by this all Black town for her skin tone.

Like the generation before her, Jude runs away from the city and towards a track scholarship in Los Angeles. There she excels in school and falls in love with a young man also running from a former life. Dropping a dead name and picking up chest binders, Reese enters into a will they wont they friendship with Jude. They fall for each other while shedding the trauma that society placed on their bodies. While Jude is working at an event she meets a young white woman named Kennedy. Kennedy is the daughter of a white woman who looks exactly like Jude’s mother. Too stunned to speak, Jude organizes an elaborate plan to speak to this white woman who may be her aunt.

Stella has shaved off massive portions of herself in order to pass for white including any family history or voice, so as to not draw attention to herself. Alienating herself from any community, including her daughter and husband. Thus when Jude tries to re-enter her aunt’s life, Stella rebuffs any plea for connection. In frustration, Jude tells Kennedy the truth of a family lineage too peculiar for her to accept.

Years later, after a semi-successful career as an actress, Kennedy meets Jude again who gives her a picture of their mothers together in Mallard. The picture draws Stella back home where her mother’s dementia has taken over the small woman in the small town. In her mother’s reality no time has passed, welcoming her daughter into the kitchen to get a dinner together. However, Desiree remembers the lapse in time, but the sisters come to an understanding of each others decisions. After a drunken joyful night as sisters, Stella runs away again, as she cannot face leaving her mother or Desiree again. Stella does leave behind her wedding ring to help her mother’s medical expenses.

Mallard gets absorbed into a larger town, Jude’s grandmother dies and Desiree moves to Houston with her love Early. Stella opens up to her daughter, but tells Kennedy that she must never tell her father.

Aiight so boom…

There’s so much to discuss in this book, but the thing that I kept coming back to is how I first encountered it- in relation to Passing. I kept thinking, what does it mean to cover passing almost 90 years after a novella, now largely deemed a classic? I think the emphasis on now is quiet, but important. It is necessary to know that contemporary critics deemed a story largely about the interplay and thoughts of two black women to be uneventful. However, when you read the 1929 work now the sapphic undertones of the book and the possible murder at the end seem more than eventful enough! So what does it mean to strip a 2020 work of the most eventful qualities of its predecessor? It forces the audience to care about the interior lives of Black women. The punishment for the racial transgression of passing in the 1929 novella was death. However, in 2020 the punishment is an internal blurring of truth and fiction that causes a constant identity crisis, an inability to connect with any community including one’s daughter, the deletion of self to the extent that you worry whether anyone actually knows who you are. I don’t think Nella Larsen would have been able to convey the intense internal sorrow of decades of a passing woman’s life to a 1929 audience, if the death of a passing woman was seen as uneventful.

 This movement from physical to internal reality is throughout the book. You have Stella’s act of passing as a white woman despite her being Black, Jude’s commitment to seeing herself as a white woman despite the knowledge of her mother being Black, and Reese’s story of making his internal reality evident (top surgery). The central conflict of the book is the conflict between the internal life of the characters against a society that refuses to see them in their entirety which causes a dysphoria between the physical and internal. Thus making the internal conflict one that begins with external conflict with society. However, in order to get to an understanding of the issue as simultaneously external and internal, we first have to care about the thoughts and feelings of marginalized folx. It is a shame that it took audiences 90 years to get here.