Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett (3)

Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California. She lived with her mother, a fingerprint analyst, and her father, an attorney. Bennett's mother grew up in rural Louisiana as the daughter of sharecroppers. She told Bennett stories about a town where people intermarried in hopes that the next generation would have lighter skin. This real town was the inspiration for the town of Mallard, the place Bennett’s novel, The Vanishing Half, begins (1).

The Vanishing Half cover art (3)

The Vanishing Half opens with Desiree Vignes returning to her hometown of Mallard, Louisiana, with her daughter. This is significant for two reasons: one, Desiree had not been seen for nearly 16 years; two, her daughter had the darkest skin the town had ever seen (4). Desiree had been living in Washington, D.C, working as a fingerprint analyst. She ran back to Mallard to escape her abusive husband, but the townsfolk were not accepting of Jude, Desiree's daughter, who did not fit in with the town's carefully cultivated lightness. Jude was able to move away from Mallard and the ostracization she felt there when she went to UCLA on a track scholarship (4). She started working at a catering company to pay her way through school. While at an event with the company, Jude saw a woman that looked just like her mother. This woman was Stella Vignes, Desiree's twin sister. The twins had run from Mallard to New Orleans when they were 14 years old after they saw their father lynched by a group of white supremacists (4). Desiree, who was bolder and more outspoken than Stella, fell in with the Black community in New Orleans (2). Stella, when finding a job, is assumed by her prospective employer to be white, and she does nothing to dissuade this notion. She marries her employer and they move to Los Angeles (3). Stella lives in a white community as a white woman, at one point going against a Black family that tried to move into the neighborhood she and her husband and their daughter Kennedy were living in (3). The story follows Jude and Kennedy and explores how their mothers' choices affect their lives.

Bethanne Patrick of the Los Angeles Times notes that stories about twins with diverging paths in life are not unusual, but complements Bennett on her ability to make the story interesting despite a familiar premise. Patrick admires Bennett's control of her content and pacing so that the characters' development "feels honest" (4). Patrick also notes that Bennett include other minority groups including queer characters and impoverished characters, but does not turn them into allegories in her novel about colorism. Jude's boyfriend is transgender, and the two of them have friends who are drag queens, but those characters are just people. They are not included to show that non-racial prejudice exists; instead, the novel recognizes how people belonging to various minority groups face different struggles and that each person within a group copes differently. Patrick also notes that Mallard has a "dehumanizing" system in place that expects the fairest young men and women of the town to marry and reproduce regardless of their feelings (4). The irony of this town trying to produce people with light skin is that they still experience racial violence, like the Vignes twins' father was lynched. 

Michael Donkor, writing for The Guardian, notes that Stella saw being white as the only way to stay safe from white people. Her decision to live as a white woman was dictated by the violence that killed her father and traumatized her. She must constantly think about how a white person, who grew up with privilege, would act. She is so determined not to be exposed as a Black woman that she chases a Black family out of her neighborhood for fear that her husband or friends might see similarities between her and the dark-skinned woman. Donkor admires Bennett's depiction of Stella's "roiling emotions" as she tries to protect herself by digging deeper into the lie she is living (2). Bennett explores how much of herself Stella loses by hiding it for so long. 

Lisa Page of The Washington Post noted that Stella's acting influenced her daughter Kennedy. Page notes that "performance [...] comes naturally" to Kennedy (3). Kennedy is able to hide any part of herself that she doesn't want the people she is with to see. Page contrasts Kennedy's acting with the "reinvention" of the self done by Jude's boyfriend Reese and their drag queen friend Barry (3). Reese and Barry undergo more of a physical transformation than Kennedy or Stella, but they also only allow certain parts of themselves to show around certain people. Page observes that "reinvention and erasure are two sides of the same coin" (3). The main difference is that reinvention creates a new self, destroying the old self in the process while erasure destroys the old self, creating a new self in the process.

Bennett takes her own experiences as a Black woman living in Southern California and inserts her experiences into her writing. She writes compelling novels, often focusing on intersectionality of minority group experiences within a person. She has written essays as well as her first novel, The Mothers. She has also written for American Girl. To learn more about Bennett or her other works, visit her website.

Works Cited

(1) Chuang, Angie. "The Daring Bestsellers of Brit Bennett." Stanford Magazine, May 2023, stanfordmag.org/contents/the-daring-bestsellers-of-brit-bennett. Accessed 19 February 2024.

(2) Donkor, Michael. "The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review-a twin's struggle to 'pass' for white." The Guardian, 4 June 2020, www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/04/vanishing-half-brit-bennett-review-twin-struggle-pass-white-new-orleans. Accessed 19 February 2024.

(3) Page, Lisa. "Brit Bennett’s ‘The Vanishing Half’ is a fierce examination of passing and the price people pay for a new identity." The Washington Post, 1 June 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/brit-bennetts-the-vanishing-half-is-a-fierce-examination-of-passing-and-the-price-people-pay-for-a-new-identity. Accessed 19 February 2024.

(4) Patrick, Bethanne. "Review: 'The Vanishing Half' reveals novelist Brit Bennett in full." Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2020, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-05-28/the-vanishing-half-reveals-brit-bennett-in-full. Accessed 19 February 2024.