Neither girl enjoyed cleaning the Duponts’ house, a house that was grander than they ever imagined, belonging to a white family. The twins had been two halves of one whole with no secrets between them, but their lives started diverging. Stella and Desiree both started working for the Dupont’s. Yet, their mother needed help, and when the girls turned 16, she told them they needed to find jobs and would not be returning to school. The Vignes family was a proud one, their ancestor having founded the town. His wife had to take in laundry and clean houses to pay the bills. Their comfortable family life was usurped by the loss of their father’s income he’d been a carpenter. The girls didn’t understand why and were traumatized by this experience. When he didn’t die from their assault at this house, they stormed the hospital to finish the job.

They’d accused him of “writing nasty things to a white woman” even though he couldn’t read and write the more likely reason was to get rid of the competition to their business. When the girls were little, they saw their father dragged and shot by a group of white men. It’s a point of accomplishment when the children are lighter colored than their parents, and Stella and Desiree achieved that goal. They are distrustful of dark-skinned people, considering themselves better because of the proximity of their skin color to whiteness. All the people in Mallard are black but light-skinned. Desiree and Stella are identical twin girls born in the 1950s in Mallard, a small town in Louisiana. The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett is a multigenerational story of an African American family.

The vanishing half pages