The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.

“Negroes always love our hometowns,” he said. “Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.”

“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.”

Nothing made a boy less exciting than the fact that you were supposed to like him.

How easily her skin would wear the mark of an angry man.

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

Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.

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.

How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some.

In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.

“This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”

On the weekends, she and Reese wandered Santa Barbara beaches, or explored the Natural History Museum, and even once went whale watching in Long Beach. They’d

Do this w Sara

You don’t have to wear it here. I don’t care what you look like.” She thought he might be relieved, but instead, a dark and unfamiliar look passed across his face. “It’s not about you,” he said,

She wasn’t afraid of the dark; he felt safer inside it.

You could live a life this way, split. As long as you knew who was in charge.

Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.

A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping

Later, Tina would tell her parents that the gin made her do it. The gin that he’d poured in two big glasses, replacing his mother’s Seagram with water. She did not tell her parents that she’d kissed him first, or that they’d only stopped because his family had come home early.

No one recognizin me. It’d be like showin up to your own funeral. Just watchin life go on without you.

This was comfort, no longer wanting anything.

Why would anyone insist on doing such a thing? To make a point? To make himself miserable? To end up on the nightly news like all those protesters, beaten or martyred in hopes of convincing white people to change their minds?

“You sound like a Bolshevik,”

She was too young to look this tired, but she must be, fighting all the time. Stella never fought. She always gave in. She was a coward that way.

For some reason, he’d thought the cotton would be brown.

if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.

The new foods to try, the signs you couldn’t read, the language spoken around you, on the bus or the street, that allowed you to drift off into your own thoughts.

inscrutable, pretentious, but never boring.

Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before.

embarrassed for all men, really, forced to wear their desire so openly. She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted.

“It’s terribly difficult to quit,” she said. “All the best things are.”

She only played white girls, which is to say, she never played herself.

He wanted her to understand him, she’d thought at first, but later she realized that he just liked having a dramatic backstory that contrasted with the man he’d grown up to be: careful, studious, always cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses.

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

“I never play the girl next door,” a black guest star told her once. “I guess no one wants to live next door to me.”

The slap confused her less than the kiss after, her mother’s anger and love colliding together so violently.

saying nigger was as bad as repeating any swear word;

I was drunk. I didn’t mean it.” “You meant it,” Jude said. “And you were drunk. Both things can be true.”

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

Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time.

Her mother had always hated taking pictures. She hated being nailed down in place.

with a man for six weeks or six years. Leaving was the same, regardless. Leaving was simple. Staying was

“Would you still love me,” she said, “if I weren’t white?” “No,” he said, tugging her closer. “Because then you wouldn’t be you.”

She hadn’t meant to yell. She just expected her mother to feel something.

Berlin where she lived for three months, sharing a flat with two Swedes. One night they got blitzed and she showed them the picture. The blond boys smiled at her quizzically, handing it back.

mother would be out there in the audience watching.

“Imagine your life here,” she said. “Imagine who you could be.”

own. Like leaving, the hardest part of returning was deciding to.

Went to find myself, she wrote. I’m safe. Don’t worry about me. The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one.

She hadn’t ridden a bus in years. He nodded toward a pay phone. “You could call your people,” he said. “Have someone come get you.”