The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.

“White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.” Willie Lee shook his head, packing tobacco into his pipe. “You gotta follow they rules but they change ’em when they feel. Devilish, you ask me.”

But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die. The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided that it would be so.

If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.

People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack,

The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

sometimes lying was an act of love.

There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

“You shouldn’t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it.

Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.