The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

Ten years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. To Brit Bennett, thank you for giving me a book that I can read to my daughter and granddaughter in the decades to come. The Vanishing Half is a refreshing contemporary adaptation of the American familial narrative, and it is a book I will cherish. As the sisters mature into mothers and their daughters into adulthood, each woman must confront her own relationship to her past, to family duty, and to her own autonomy.īennett’s writing filled an existing void within me: for mothers and grandmothers to be granted the humanity they rightfully deserve, but were denied. But when Stella makes the decision to pass as white-disappearing from her sister’s life in order to pursue the “American Dream” of whiteness-the twins’ paths diverge, determining not just their own futures, but the futures of their daughters and their relationship to Black womanhood. Sometimes I ask myself the question, are there aspects of my ancestors’ experiences that I would remove for future generations, if I could? In her new book, The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett articulates this question through the lives of two light-skinned Black twins whose decisions around choosing to pass-or not-shape their lives, their daughters lives, and the lives of generations to come.ĭesiree and Stella Vignes were once inseparable, fleeing their small southern town to build a life together in New Orleans. As a descendant of enslaved Black Americans, I am well aware of the ways that cultural trauma is passed from mothers to daughters over the years.

The vanishing half book