Previous
Chapter 7
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
It soon becomes public knowledge that the new neighbors are Reginald and Loretta Walker and their young daughter. Everyone in Stella’s neighborhood knows who Reginald Walker is, since he’s famous for his role as Sergeant Tommy Taylor, a police officer on a well-known television show. Blake enjoys living near a celebrity, yelling out Sergeant Tommy Taylor’s famous catchphrase (“File that form!”) whenever he sees Reginald across the street—something that Reginald takes in stride, though Stella can tell he finds it annoying. As for the other neighbors, Stella’s circle of wealthy white friends are still suspicious of the new family, insisting that Loretta is “uppity” because she wants to enroll her daughter in the same school that all of the neighborhood’s white children attend.
The fact that Stella’s neighbors think Loretta is “uppity” simply because she wants her daughter to have access to the same quality of education as white children is indicative of their inherently racist way of looking at the world. To them, Black children don’t deserve the same services as white children. And though Stella doesn’t say anything, she clearly recognizes just how bigoted this viewpoint is, considering that she herself always wanted to go to college but—because a group of racist white men killed her father and thus deprived her family of financial stability—she instead had to quit school to support herself.
Themes
Stella looks out the window one morning and sees Kennedy playing with the girl across the street. Without thinking, she runs outside and grabs her daughter by the arm, pulling her inside. When Kennedy asks why she can’t play with the Walker girl, Stella repeats what her own mother once told her—namely, that she can’t play with Black people (Stella uses the n-word when she says this). The next day, Loretta Walker rings the doorbell and shoves a doll that Kennedy left behind into Stella’s arms.
By repeating her own mother’s phrase (which includes the n-word), Stella perpetuates the exact kind of racism that she herself ran from when she initially started passing as white. Kennedy has been raised as a white person and has no idea that she has Black ancestry, but instead of teaching her daughter a message of racial unity, Stella models hatred and bigotry.
Themes
Stella avoids Loretta for the next few weeks. She hears from a neighborhood friend that Loretta plans to sue the school system for not letting her daughter attend. Stella’s friend finds this absurd, insisting that Loretta must love drama for the sake of drama. When Stella notes that Loretta doesn’t seem like someone who wants to create problems, her friend asks how she would know. Immediately, Stella changes her tone, saying that her friend is probably right about Loretta.
Although Stella used a racial slur in front of Kennedy and forbade her from playing with Loretta’s daughter, she now seems to feel uncomfortable about her friend’s racist remarks. It’s almost as if she’s alright with using racist rhetoric herself but struggles to hear white people say the same kinds of things—a contradictory view of bigotry that hints at just how complex it is for her, as a Black woman passing as white, to talk about race.
Themes
Soon enough, Stella’s guilt takes over and drives her to bring Loretta a cake. On the day she brings it over, she sees that Loretta has friends over and thinks it’s probably a good thing, since it’ll make it easier to give Loretta the cake, say sorry, and quickly leave. But when she arrives, Loretta invites her inside. Her friends are polite, but they subtly shame Stella by saying that they’ve heard a lot about her. When Stella finally tries to apologize, she pauses, hoping that Loretta will jump in and dismiss the matter altogether. But Loretta lets her continue. Finally, Loretta says that she didn’t even want to move to the neighborhood in the first place—something Stella empathizes with. After all, she knows what it’s like to live “in a world not meant for you.”
Stella doesn’t say that she understands what it’s like to live “in a world not meant for you,” since this would open the door to a conversation about her past and the fact that she’s Black. Instead, she presents herself to Loretta as a white woman and hopes that Loretta will relieve her of the burden of having to say why, exactly, she’s sorry. But Loretta doesn’t jump in to make it easier for her, perhaps sensing that Stella is trying to wriggle out of actually apologizing. At the same time, though, what Stella does is a lot more than any of her white neighbors would do, and this is because she empathizes with Loretta’s situation, knowing—of course—what it feels like to be Black in a racist world.
Themes
Get the entire The Vanishing Half LitChart as a printable PDF.
Before leaving Loretta’s house, Stella suggests that their daughters should play together sometime at a nearby park. Loretta takes her up on this proposal several days later. As their daughters play, the two mothers sit on a park bench and talk about what brought them to the neighborhood. Loretta came to Los Angeles not because she wanted to live in the city, but because Reginald had big dreams of becoming a famous actor. Stella privately reflects on the fact that although she doesn’t particularly love Los Angeles, everything in her life since she started passing as white has been a very deliberate choice. She had to completely create her own identity, and though she followed Blake from New Orleans to Boston to Los Angeles, even that feels to her like a choice.
There’s an impressive kind of personal agency in the path Stella has taken in life. Although she has largely followed Blake from place to place, the only reason she’s with him in the first place is because she chose to present herself as white. In this sense, she has more agency that someone like Desiree, who has ended up living in Mallard for the majority of her life even though she always dreamed of leaving. Yet again, then, the novel refrains from harshly judging Stella’s decision to pass as white—to the contrary, in this moment it celebrates her courage to decide what’s best for herself.
Themes
Stella asks Loretta why she chose to live in a white neighborhood when she could easily have found a friendlier place to live—a place where neighbors aren’t so hostile toward Black people. Loretta’s answer is simple: people are going to hate her anyway, so she might as well live in a big house in a rich neighborhood. After this conversation, Stella and Loretta start seeing each other on a regular basis. All summer, Stella looks forward to her time with Loretta. But she never tells Blake about their friendship. She even asks Kennedy not to mention it, urging her daughter to keep quiet about the frequent playdates she has with Loretta’s daughter.
Although Stella originally disliked the idea of a Black family moving in across the street, she now seems to revel in the chance to have a Black friend in her life. Of course, Loretta doesn’t know Stella is Black, but it’s clear that Stella values the mere feeling of spending time with another Black person—someone who knows what it’s like to experience racism and who certainly notices all of the ways in which white people discriminate against Black people. After all, Stella has spent many years around white people, so she’s undoubtedly used to standing silently by while people say and do racist things. To be with Loretta, then, feels like a respite from a constant barrage of bigotry and insensitivity.
Themes
Stella goes to Loretta’s house one day to play cards with her friends. At one point, Loretta’s friends start trying to dissuade Loretta from sending her daughter to the white school, saying it will only do the little girl harm. When they ask Stella what she thinks, she doesn’t know what to say. After a moment, she agrees that it’d be better for Loretta’s daughter if she didn’t go to the all-white school. Plus, she adds, everyone in the neighborhood already speaks so poorly of Loretta, and sending her daughter to the school would only make things worse. One of Loretta’s friends points out that Stella probably doesn’t defend Loretta when other people say bad things about her—a comment that ruins the entire afternoon.
The reason the comment made by Loretta’s friend ruins the afternoon is that everyone knows it’s true: Stella clearly doesn’t stand up for Loretta when their white neighbors say bad things about her. To Loretta and her friends, Stella is yet another racist white woman. What they don’t know, of course, is that Stella doesn’t stand up for Loretta because she’s afraid that doing so would reveal that she, too, is Black.
Themes
After Loretta’s friends leave, Stella helps with the dishes. She apologizes for the conversation they had earlier about school, but Loretta doesn’t want to hear about Stella’s guilt. When Loretta reaches for a wet wine glass, she knocks it to the floor. Before she can kneel to clean it up, Stella stops her, saying, “Don’t, baby, you’ll cut yourself,” and cleans it up herself. Several days later, Loretta asks her about her family while they’re lying by Stella’s pool. Stella says her family died in an accident, but she also mentions that she used to have a twin. It’s the first time in years that she has talked about Desiree, and she doesn’t know what to say. But Loretta is supportive, empathetically saying that losing a twin must be like losing half of oneself.
Despite the tense interaction that Stella and Loretta have while playing cards, they still manage to connect on a personal level. When Stella doesn’t let Loretta clean up the broken glass, she humbles herself before her friend while using the affectionate word “baby”—a word none of the white woman in the neighborhood would call Loretta. Stella therefore shows that she cares about Loretta and feels close to her, which becomes especially obvious when she later talks to her about Desiree and her past. She doesn’t reveal that she’s Black, but the mere fact that she opens up about her personal history is a testament to how much she wants to connect with Loretta.
Themes
