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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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