The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

Leon couldn’t have written that note—the white men must have been angered over something else and who could understand their rages? Willie Lee heard that the white men were angry that Leon stole their business by underbidding them. But how could you shoot a man for accepting less than what you asked for? “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.” In the bedroom, the twins sat, legs swinging over the mattress edge, and pinched at a piece of pound cake. “But what did Daddy do?” Stella kept asking. Desiree sighed, for the first time feeling the burden of having to supply answers. Oldest was oldest, even if by only seven minutes. “Like Willie Lee say. He do his job too good.” “But that don’t make sense.” “Don’t have to. It’s white folks.” As the years passed, their father would only come to her in flashes, like when she fingered a denim shirt and felt small again, pressed against the rough fabric spanning her father’s chest. You were supposed to be safe in Mallard—that strange, separate town—hidden amongst your own. 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.