The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

“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.

She hated to be called beautiful. It was the type of thing people only said because they felt they ought to.

That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.

She preferred him to think of her that way. Blank. A curtain hung between her past and present and she could never peek behind it. Who knows what might scuttle through?

“Yes, but don’t you—I mean, it’s got to be easier, isn’t it, if you—” “Stuck to my own kind?” Loretta lit another cigarette, her face shining like bronze.

FIRST MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in Memphis, then Bobby Kennedy in downtown Los Angeles. Soon it felt like you couldn’t open a paper without seeing the bleeding body of an important man.

She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point. Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.

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

Likely does not mean certain. Improbable does not mean impossible.

“You frighten him. A woman with a brain. Nothing scares them more.”

because she was shit at it, she was shit at everything else.

The devil could love the woman he beat; the sun could burst through a rainstorm. Nothing was as simple as you wanted it to be.

When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.

But sometimes lying was an act of love. Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become.

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

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.

Jude almost laughed when her mother had told her—that was the solution, not desegregating the graveyard, just cleaning the headstones on both sides.