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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Vanishing Half, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race and Identity
Loss, Memory, and Inheritance
Companionship, Support, and Independence
Class and Privilege
Summary
Analysis
One night, when Desiree and Stella were little girls, their father, Leon, was whittling at home when five white men burst into the house. The girls watched as the men dragged Leon outside and accused him of writing an inappropriate letter to a white woman. It was an obvious lie, since everyone knew Leon couldn’t read or write. But the white men didn’t care. They shot him four times, but he didn’t die. While he was recuperating in the hospital three days later, the white men found him and shot him in the head.
Leon Vignes’s brutally violent death serves as a reminder of white society’s vicious racism. Although the people of Mallard see themselves as somehow superior to dark-skinned Black people, their colorist ideas don’t save them from the very real threat of racist violence, since white racists don’t recognize much of a distinction between light-skinned and dark-skinned Black people—to them, anyone with Black ancestry is Black and thus receives the full brunt of the country’s racism (unless, of course, light-skinned Black people hide their racial heritage and pass as white, which is exactly what Stella ends up doing). The colorism in Mallard therefore does little more than needlessly advance racist ideas about skin color, simply adding to the already overwhelming amount of prejudice running rampant throughout the country.
Themes
Desiree and Stella tried to make sense of why the white men murdered their father. They heard rumors that the men were angry about something related to business, but the explanation didn’t add up. And yet, the girls realized that it didn’t matter what their father did or did not do—either way, there would have been no reasoning with the white men. Still, their father’s murder haunted them and challenged the idea that Mallard was a safe place for Black people in the South. Although everyone in town had light skin and sometimes even looked white, they were still susceptible to racism and violence.
Desiree and Stella learned as young girls about the irrationality that comes with racism and hatred. Whether or not Leon Vignes actually did anything to anger the white men was irrelevant, since it’s clear that the enraged men were simply eager to turn their violence on a Black man. In other words, they were motivated by racism, not by rationality. Even though Desiree and Stella have light skin, they learn that it can unfortunately be quite dangerous to be Black in the United States, regardless of skin tone—the only way to escape this danger, it seems, would be to pass as white.
Themes
After Desiree’s return, Adele feels strange about having just one twin back home—she always had two daughters, and now it feels like she only has one. But she tells Desiree to enroll Jude at the local school, effectively insisting that her daughter and granddaughter stay for a while. On Jude’s first day of school, Desiree ignores her mother’s advice to dress her daughter in muted colors, instead opting to outfit her in white and pink—colors that Adele thinks emphasize the darkness of Jude’s skin. Desiree ignores her mother, but when she walks Jude to school, she realizes that maybe she shouldn’t have made such a statement with Jude’s outfit, since everyone is staring at her.
By returning to Mallard, Desiree inadvertently puts Jude in a difficult position, since Jude is much darker than everyone else and now lives in a town in which people cast judgment on dark-skinned people. Adele’s suggestion to dress Jude in muted colors to downplay the contrast between her dark skin and her clothes is quite colorist, highlighting the extent to which people in Mallard try to lean away from their own Blackness. At the same time, though, Adele seems aware that Jude will feel especially out of place at school if she dresses in bright clothing. In a complicated, problematic way, then, Adele’s advice can almost be seen as an effort—albeit misguided—to help her granddaughter avoid extra scrutiny from her colorist peers.
Themes
After dropping Jude off at school, Desiree hitches a ride to the police station in Opelousas to see about working there in the fingerprint department. The sheriff is impressed by her experience in Washington, D.C. and her fast completion of the department’s aptitude test, but then he sees that she’s from Mallard, so he tells her to leave and that she shouldn’t have wasted his time. Discouraged, she goes to the Surly Goat, a bar on the edge of town that her father’s side of the family has owned for a long time. When she sits down and orders a drink, she looks up and is astonished to see Early Jones sitting at the other end of the bar.
Desiree’s experience with the white sheriff is a perfect example of how racist people often make petty and arbitrary decisions based on race. If Desiree had never revealed where she’s from, the sheriff wouldn’t have known she was Black and clearly would have hired her. After all, she’s extremely qualified for the job, since she worked as a fingerprint analyst in Washington, D.C., thus holding a job in a major city that would undoubtedly have a much higher workload than the police department in a small city like Opelousas. And yet, the sheriff doesn’t hire her simply because he finds out that she’s Black, which would obviously have no impact on her ability to do her job.
Themes
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Desiree first met Early not long before she left Mallard. Until then, she had never spent much time with dark-skinned boys. The only dark-skinned young men she ever saw were from farm families who moved to the edge of town and farmed the land for a short while before moving on. One evening that summer, though, Early Jones came to her front porch with a bag of fruit. He was working at the time for a farm on the outskirts of town, delivering fruit to the people of Mallard. He convinced Desiree to step outside and try a fig he had just bitten into. She thought they might kiss, but they didn’t. Still, eating the same fig as him felt intimate and thrilling.
In this scene, Desiree both literally and figuratively eats forbidden fruit, since Early is—as a dark-skinned person— someone she’s not allowed to interact with, so eating the same piece of fruit as him is clearly something her mother would consider inappropriate. Her interest in Early is a sign of her skepticism surrounding the many prejudices and rules that define life in Mallard. Whereas everyone else in town subscribes to colorist ideas about people with dark skin, Desiree doesn’t see the harm in interacting with dark-skinned people—an initial sign that her values don’t align with those of her community members, which will later push her to run away.
Themes
Throughout the summer, Desiree and Early spent as much time together as possible. They eventually kissed, even though he told her he would be leaving town in the fall to work in New Orleans. Each evening, Early would emerge from the woods and wait for Desiree to greet him on the porch. One night, her mother stepped outside, looked at Early, and told him to leave. Desiree was upset, but Adele insisted that her daughter would thank her someday.
Adele’s comment about how Desiree will thank her someday suggests that she sees her colorist worldview as something that will protect her daughter from harm. It’s not just that she has prejudices against dark-skinned people—it's that she thinks keeping Desiree away from people with dark skin is a way of ensuring her daughter will steer clear of the many dangers of racism. What she doesn’t consider, however, is that her own light-skinned husband was murdered by an angry mob of racists simply because they considered him Black, so it’s not exactly the case that refusing to associate with dark-skinned Black people will really help a light-skinned Black person avoid racism (unless, perhaps, that person decides to fully pass as white, which is what Stella does).
Themes
Early never came by again, and by the end of the summer, he’d left the area altogether. Desiree didn’t know how to reach him, but she also didn’t know what she would even say if she did get ahold of him. After all, she suspected that, on some level, she saw her relationship with a dark-skinned boy like Early as wrong—just like her mother did.
Desiree clearly has feelings for Early, but she has internalized the colorism (and even blatant racism) set forth by everyone in Mallard. Her mother behaves very unkindly to Early simply because she doesn’t think he’s light-skinned enough to spend time with her daughter. The fact that Desiree believes on some level that she shouldn’t be hanging with Early demonstrates just how destructive and influential such colorist narratives can be.
Themes
At the bar, Desiree spots Early and moves toward him. When she asks him why he’s there, he says he’s in town for business. He then asks if her husband would be all right with her spending time in a bar full of men. She briefly wonders how he knows that she has a husband, but then she remembers that she’s still wearing her wedding ring. She’s also wearing a scarf around her neck to cover the bruise Sam left when he grabbed her there. She and Early flirt for a while, and then he tenderly lifts her scarf from her neck. For a moment, she enjoys the feel of his hand, but then she pushes him hard and storms out of the bar.
Early’s job is to find Desiree so that Sam can track her down and, presumably, bring her home. On the surface, this assignment might not seem all that sinister to Early, but now he's forced to recognize that Sam’s motivations might not be as innocent as he originally thought. His slow realization that Sam was abusive to Desiree will make it more difficult for him to complete the job, especially because he and Desiree have their own romantic history—to say nothing of the fact that they’re clearly still interested in one another, as evidenced by their flirting in the bar.
Themes
Early didn’t actually intend to find Desiree so quickly, so he was surprised when he saw her at the bar. The next morning, he goes to Desire’s childhood home, remembering how Adele sent him away the last time he was there. He’d gone home dejected that night, but his uncle had only laughed at him, asking him what he had expected. The light-skinned people of Mallard, his uncle suggested, saw him in the same way white racists saw Black people. Now, Early hides in the woods and takes pictures of Desiree as she smokes on the porch. When he talks to Sam on the phone that night, though, he doesn’t reveal that he has already found her. Instead, he says he needs more time.
Early’s experience as a teenager in Mallard is a good illustration of how colorism within the Black community is really just another version of the racism inflicted on Black people by white society. In the same way that racist white people discriminate against Black people, the light-skinned residents of Mallard discriminate against darker-skinned people, subjecting people who look like Early to a similar kind of animosity that they themselves experience when interacting with racist white people. In this way, it’s clear that colorism just perpetuates the nation’s broader forms of racism.
Themes
