The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.

The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.

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.”

All of her blessings had come so easily in the beginning of her life, and she’d spent the back half losing them all.

MALLARD BENT. A place was not solid, Early had learned that already. A town was jelly, forever molding around your memories.

She was, in a way, like Stella. Private, like if she told you anything about herself, she was giving away something she could never get back.

You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it.

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

She could make a foolish decision if she pretended it was based on thrift alone.

Reese never finished high school, which he didn’t regret at first, not until he fell in love with a smart girl.

She had become white only because everyone thought she was.

Look at this, look at that, she must have been such a good girl this year! Unlike all those rotten poor children staring at empty trees who must have deserved it, bad because they were poor, poor because they were bad.

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

He was straining against his white briefs and she felt embarrassed for him, 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.

This was the first time Kennedy realized that her mother was a liar.

He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.

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.