The Vanishing Half: A Novel

Desiree recalls her father’s murder when she and Stella were only children. Five White men came to the Vignes home and shot him. He survived, and they went to the hospital and shot him again. They claimed he had written a rude note to a White woman though Leon Vignes was illiterate. In reality, his furniture business was cutting into the profits of the men who killed him. At the wake, someone observes, “White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little […] You gotta follow they rules but they change ’em when they feel. Devilish, you ask me” (35).

The morning after her arrival in Mallard, Desiree enrolls Jude in school, where the other children are shocked by Jude’s dark skin. Desiree’s mother, Adele, asks Desiree how she intends to support her child, berating her for not having a plan. Desiree goes to a nearby town and applies for a job as a fingerprint analyst with the police department but is immediately rejected.

Disgusted by her plight, Desiree wanders into a local dive called the Surly Goat. As she sits drinking, she notices Early stroll in and immediately recognizes him. She recalls the summer when she was a teenager and Early delivered groceries. He brought her small gifts of fruit. Adele warned Desiree to stay away from this dark-skinned boy who came from a sharecropper family. After the romance broke up, the pair didn’t see each other for 14 years.

When Desiree asks Early what he’s doing back in Mallard, he casually says that he’s just passing through. He notices a bruise on Desiree’s neck, but she shoves him away and storms out of the bar. Later that evening, when Early calls Sam, he lies and says he hasn’t discovered Desiree’s whereabouts yet. 

Desiree recalls the early days when she and Stella tried to scrape out a living in New Orleans by working in a laundry, sleeping on floors, and eating handouts. After a few months, Stella landed a job as a secretary by passing for White. A year later, without warning, Desiree discovered that Stella and all her belongings were gone. Her sister left a note, stating that she needed to go her own way.

Back in Mallard in the present, Desiree takes a job as a waitress at a greasy spoon called Lou’s Egg House, waiting on a clientele that was once beneath her family’s social status. As the months pass, she adjusts to small-town life, but the townsfolk are somewhat disconcerted at having dark-skinned Jude in their midst: “They weren’t used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them […] If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it” (64).

One day, Early shows up at the restaurant and proposes to help Desiree find her sister. He discloses that Sam hired him to track Desiree but says he will never betray that she is in Mallard. Early takes other jobs while Desiree thinks about hiring him to find Stella. Eventually, she agrees to accompany him to pick up her sister’s trail in New Orleans, where an old friend says she saw Stella years earlier on the arm of a White man.

Back in Mallard, Adele discloses that Stella experimented with passing for White as a teenager. Desiree is shocked because she never knew. She thinks:

But the passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse (69).

Early and Desiree find an outdated forwarding address for Stella in Boston. Before Early leaves to follow up this latest lead, he and Desiree become lovers.