The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett’s Identity Novel

Race, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Whiteness, Psychology of Racism in the Vanishing Half, Psychology of the Vanishing Half

Who am I?  This essential question is being asked in a variety of ways during this summer of COVID.  Brit Bennett’s novel, The Vanishing Half, was conceived long before this summer but speaks to the BLM movement and more deeply to the questions of identity that race helps us wrestle with and that are necessarily deeply psychoanalytically interesting.  How nice to take a break from my obsessive and at times paranoid worrying about returning to the classroom at a time when it makes no earthly sense to engage in a page turning beach read – at the beach of all places…

 

This book is really a study of character – or more precisely characters.  But it holds the reader’s attention less with plot than with mystery – who is the person who is not being discussed at the moment is the consistent question – and that person gets introduced at the moment when we can’t stand not knowing anything about them a moment longer.  So it is a sort of relay race, where each character of interest, after having become better known, passes the baton to the next person we are curious about. 

 

We start by learning about a place and a group of people who live there.  The place is Mallard, Louisiana in the early 1960s.  It exists on no map – it has no Post Office, but it is a place where very light skinned black people have lived together for generations.  Adele Decuir, the inheritor of her great- great grandfather’s vision of a town that was filled with children who were a little more perfect – more white – than their parents, married into a cursed family – the Vignes.  All four Vignes boys, including Adele’s husband, died young.  Her husband was lynched in front of his identical twin daughters, Desiree and Stella, when they were quite young. 

 

The lynching, like everything else for these twins who lived together and relied on each other for everything, affected them each quite differently.  Desiree, who gets the baton first, was the outgoing one who felt cramped in their tiny town.  She was the one who pushed for them to get out.  She saw her father’s death as one of those random things that happen.  Stella was the nervous, smart one who actually came up with the plan for them to get out and helped keep them out, much to Desiree’s surprise.  Didn’t Stella buy into the Mythology of Mallard?  Wasn’t she content there?  For her part, Stella felt more deeply than Desiree that her father, despite his light skin, was killed because he was black and whites having the power to kill blacks affected her more powerfully.  Desiree feels guilty for having pushed Stella out of Mallard and one of the brilliant pieces of this book is that we are appreciative of finding out why she masterminded her leaving when the baton gets passed to her without our having known how curious we were about this.  But I am getting ahead of the story.

 

We follow Desiree and Stella from Mallard to New Orleans where Stella mysteriously disappears.  Stella becomes the vanishing half of the title – the missing twin.  After Stella leaves, we follow Desiree with the attentive, deeply black attorney that she marries from New Orleans to Washington D.C. where she becomes a fingerprinting expert for the FBI and returns home to Mallard with her stunningly black daughter after her husband – whom her mother is convinced she married out of spite – beats her.  When she returns home, she is tracked down by one of the really interesting characters in the book – Early.  A rootless black man who worked as a migrant farmer and plied her with fruit when he was picking in town when she was a teenager – he now hunts people for bounty, and the two of them begin an odd but working relationship – one which begins when he throws her husband off the track of finding her, and continues when he promises to find Stella for her, something he never accomplishes.  Which allows us to move on to learning about Jude, Desiree’s daughter.

 

Jude is ostracized in Mallard for being dark skinned.   The boys make fun of her – one in particular – the biggest jock in her class.  After mercilessly bullying her for over a decade, he has a clandestine sexual relationship with her that is filled with unprocessed meaning for her.  Early, acting as a paternal figure,  interrupts the relationship and helps Jude feel support.  Jude escapes Mallard by winning a state track meet and a subsequent scholarship to UCLA.  There she discovers Reese, a transsexual female to male, before there is a name for what he is.  They become roommates and lovers – though there is a sense throughout that though they deeply love each other, their fate as lovers is doomed.  Jude works to earn extra money as a catering waitress and, in a high society gig in the Hollywood Hills to earn extra money to help Reese with the cost of his surgery, she discovers the long lost Stella – and through her, her daughter, Jude’s unknown cousin, Kennedy.

 

The baton is passed to Stella, and we learn how she ends up in LA, after having learned how to pass as white, working at Maison Blanche as a secretary in marketing, marrying her boss and moving to Boston and then LA where she becomes the most vociferous voice about keeping a black family from moving into her ritzy neighborhood – apparently because she is fearful that they will recognize her as black – but when they move in, it becomes apparent that she is drawn to being in a place of comfort – where she can be, as she pretends to be white, comfortable being (secretly)  black.

 

Jude later discovers Kennedy (we are now in the mid 70s in a book that moves fluidly and clearly back and forth through time), and almost against her will is drawn into a relationship with a woman who could not be more different that she (blond, privileged, unremarkable California slacker vs. Jude’s Black, poor, hard working, smart – and sincere –person).  These cousins – daughters of twins, now outwardly display the differences that were internal between their mothers but the roles are oddly reversed – with Jude being more like the studious Stella and Kennedy more like the carefree Desiree.  Jude’s discovery of Kennedy (to whom the baton is now passed) and her revelation to Kennedy of Stella’s history explodes, but also clarifies aspects of Kennedy’s life.  When Kennedy tells Stella about Jude, Stella has an existential crisis that leads her, eventually, to be able to come to terms with her daughter, by eventually telling her what she has always hidden from her.

 

So, this is a book with four main characters – each of them women – each of them related to each other – and it is about the ways in which these women mirror – and hold up distorted mirrors to each other of who it is that they are and, in the process of doing that, help them better understand themselves and also allow the reader to appreciate both their similarities and differences.  It is also, to a lesser extent, about the men in their lives – and the characteristics of these men – and the different relationships with men that these women establish.

 

Stella, the mysterious sister who disappears, is the one who comes to understand the key to passing, which is actually the key, I think, from Bennett’s perspective, to being white.  She comes across this in the process of splitting from her sister, with whom she was always identified as the twins.  The split started when she went to a museum as a white person – entering not on the day reserved for blacks – but on a “regular” day for whites.  And she never told her sister about having done this.  This was not the first secret – perhaps the first secret is that she understood in a way that her sister didn’t what their father’s lynching meant for them – that they were vulnerable – and the second secret, the one that led her to leave Mallard with Desiree – the secret that, though she and her sister were identical twins and working as domestic help, she was the only one to get molested because the molester sensed she would not tell – and then to the final secret, the secret of her new separate identity – of someone who had cleaved from not just her identical twin but her whole family and her race.  She felt more deeply the fear that is essential to being African American.

 

The key to being able to pass, the key to being able to split from the person who made her whole, was the ability let her mind go blank.  This allowed her to play a role – to be Miss Vignes, not Stella, but she could only be Miss Vignes when Desiree was not there.  With Desiree, she was still Stella.  Now I think that Bennett is here making a very important comment.  Race is, as we know, not a biological distinction.  I think that Bennett is suggesting that becoming white – which is what whites have always done – requires a certain blankness of mind - and the ability to separate oneself from the human race. 

 

I happen also to be reading a history of Thomas Jefferson and, in that book, white women were uncannily able to say who had fathered the lighter skinned children in other’s plantations, but on her own, and here the author was talking about Jefferson’s wife’s mother, they were mystified by the parentage.  So Mrs. Jefferson, presumably was never told by her mother that Sally Hemmings was her half sister.  Hemmings, whom Jefferson would not take as a concubine until after his wife’s death, was thus an unacknowledged sibling.  Mrs. Jefferson’s mother’s mind was blank in this area.  But this is just the most available instance at this moment.  I think there is a great deal of blankness involved in being white – and so the BLM metaphor of wokeness is a good one for helping whites become aware of their status.

 

Stella certainly demonstrates in her life with her boss/husband a great deal of blankness.  She is lost in a state somewhere between boredom and stupefied wondered at the abundance of her life that makes her appear to be a sort of vacuous Californian lounging by her pool.  It is only when she is drawn into the life of her black neighbor – only when she becomes her intimate friend – they share a cigarette and they talk frankly about things – including the racial tension between them – that she seems to come to life.  But this does not last long.  The lie – and isn’t race the biggest lie in America? – the lie comes home and Stella insinuates the family out of the neighborhood as only whites know how to do.  For how could someone who hadn’t forgotten that we all belong to one race – the human race – treat someone else so cruelly?  How could Stella, who deeply loves her Mother and her sister, treat them so cruelly without creating a kind of blankness where warmth and human loving should be?

 

So Stella would appear to be the vanishing half of the title.  She is the sister who vanishes.  But she also has a half – her human half – that vanishes.  By the time she is able to reunite with Desiree and with her mother, they are no longer who they were.  Adele’s Alzheimer’s mirrors Stella’s vanishing half, and Adele’s dreamy state allows her to know Stella not as the person she has become but as the person that she was.  But this is not enough to help Stella regain her humanity.  Indeed, I think the book is questioning the ability of those who pass as whites – and I think that, since race is an invention and therefore a myth, all of us white folks are passing – to be truly human.  By deciding to be white, I think it could be concluded, we have given up on being human.  

 

In some ways, Stella does reclaim herself.  She reconnects with the wish to become educated, something that was part of what drove her from Mallard.  She becomes a teacher, and she is able to help her student’s share her love of Math.  She reconnects with her daughter, but they agree that Stella’s husband, Kennedy’s father, can never know about Stella’s past.  And she remains, in what could be her most intimate relationship, a cipher.  She is attentive to her husband – and he to her moods, but he has no access to what drives them.

 

This book, then, is about race.  And it is about being human.  And it is about the ways in which mythology impacts our humanity – indeed, defines it.  The colorism of Mallard places race as the element that defines our ability to have power in the world.  But there is a tremendous cost to attaining that power – our humanity vanishes.  Stella’s white husband is not curious enough about who she is – he is content to accept his mother’s explanation that she is Louisiana white trash – so he is content to live a life with a vanished person.  Doesn’t this expose his own absence?

 

It is time to draw this post to a close, but there are many unexplored threads in this story.  For instance, one of the questions that is being asked, through the person of Reese, is whether gender is as much a construction as race - and therefore whether these women, who are as trapped as much by their gender as their race, are being doubly penned in.  A quick perusal of the internet shows that this book will become an HBO movie or series – and that Bennett is not wild about people reducing her book to ideas – the way that I have just done.  So, in closing, I will attest to the narrative power of the book and then end with a mild criticism.

 

We are six months into social distancing.  As much as I am enjoying having the time with my family, I have also become weary of the limited social circle.  Reading this book on the way to vacation while the Reluctant Wife took her driving rotation, and then during our first day at the beach, I found myself drawn into this world – it felt like my primary world, one that the real people were interrupting.  Maybe it’s just that it’s been a while since I have been able to concentrate on something so well that I could enter into that world – but this book certainly allowed me to do it.  These characters, as mythic as they may be, also felt real.  I care about them.  And, oddly, I didn’t care about the ending of the book.  I felt satisfied by having gotten to know these people.  I didn’t need to know how things turned out for them.

 

Now for the criticism.  I think that Bennett underestimates the blankness of the white state of being.  There are certainly conscious racists, but I think most of us are unconscious racists – we are blank to the impact of institutionalized racism and how it supports our well-being, and we prefer it that way.  I think that hearing voices, like that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, that would wake us is anxiety provoking.  We prefer – and I do think this is a human trait – to be unconscious.  It is not just psychologically more comfortable, it is more efficient.  And it is a luxury that is afforded to the majority – to those in power.  Those that are not in power are much more conscious of race.

 

So I think that Bennet makes the mistake, if you can call it that, of not listening to herself – of not taking seriously enough the implications of her intuition.  I think that she doesn’t appreciate just how much the power of privilege allows (the privileged white class) to both know that race is an issue and to not think about it.  She imagines her characters – perhaps more accurately than I am giving her credit for – actively rather than passively supporting institutional racism during the tumultuous times that she depicts.  If I am off, I think it is because of my current privilege.  It is certainly the case that Jefferson and Hamilton were actively worried about race and slavery.  Jefferson was deeply immersed in its ways and also cognizant of what a powder keg it was – and ultimately how deeply wrong it was.  But most of us privileged folk, I think, are simply not that aware.

 

My hope, and it is a defensive one I know, is that being unaware of racism, we can be slightly more aware of each other, and may be less inhuman that Bennett would have us be.  There is a brief interaction between Stella and her black neighbor – when Stella “forgets” her white role and elbows the neighbor out of the way to pick up the pieces of glass the neighbor has just broken.  As if “whites” (whom Stella is at this moment) would view blacks as the ones who would tend to such things - always.  As if whites wouldn’t be moved by their human wish to connect with, support, and care for those around them – as if that were the vanished part that was assigned to those who serve us.  I think there can be some truth here – I have seen it and felt it – but my hope is that we have not vanished quite as far as this mythology would push us to.

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