Are we trapped by the way others see us?

During a recent vacation, I picked up The Vanishing Half and started reading. I couldn’t put the book down. When I told my family what was happening inside the literary world Brit Bennett creates, my ten-year-old daughter decided that she wanted to read it, too. There are many reasons this novel isn’t for children. But I promised I’d save it for her to read when she gets older—and I will. It’s that riveting.

Bennett paints a realistic picture of some of the harrowing circumstances African Americans have had to overcome. Stella and Desiree are identical twins who grow up in an all-Black town in Louisiana in the mid-20th century. Louisiana, my native state, has long been known for producing a large number of light-skinned Black people—those who’ve inherited the melanin levels of their White slaveholding ancestors.

In the town of Mallard, where Desiree and Stella live, all of the residents are light-skinned Black people. After being freed from slavery and inheriting his White father’s land, the town’s founder (who was the twins’ great-great-great-grandfather) had “married a mulatto even lighter than himself. She was pregnant then with their first child, and he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.”