By Peggy Arthur
Greetings!
“She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.”
— Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
🌱 Root Memory: The Town That Worshiped Light
In The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett plants us in a town so committed to lightness—of skin, of eye, of history—that even the roots of its founding family grow tangled in denial.
Twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes are born from that soil. Raised in a place that teaches them to shrink under the weight of their Blackness, the girls eventually run. But they don’t run in the same direction.
One flees the town.
The other flees her blood.
Stella vanishes into whiteness, erasing herself to belong.
Desiree returns to her Blackness, planting herself deeper than before.
As a dark-skinned woman of color, this story unsettled something ancestral in me. I felt the ache of inherited silence. I recognized the generational burden of colorism passed down like a family heirloom nobody asked for.
🍂 Root Split: Diverging Paths, Shared Blood
Stella lives behind a curtain of passing. She builds a life on erasure. Her daughter inherits the echo of that choice.
Desiree stays visible. Her daughter grows up in full sight—in a world that was never meant to hold her softly.
And still, their stories braid. Their daughters carry the legacy of choices they never made. Their lives curve back toward each other in a reckoning that feels both inevitable and fragile.
Bennett doesn’t give us neat endings.
She gives us returns.
She gives us reckonings.
She gives us the cost of survival.
🌾 Root Reflection: What We Carry
This book reminded me that the past is never dead. It lives in our names. In our skin. In the rooms we enter and the stories we don’t tell.
The Vanishing Half is about identity, yes—but also about what we inherit when we try to forget who we are.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but ask:
What parts of myself would I erase to survive?
And what parts of my story do I owe to the ones who come after me?
✊🏽 Rooted in You
Have you read The Vanishing Half?
Did you find echoes of your own story in its pages?
Let’s root together.
Drop a comment or rooted reflection below. 🌳
What legacy do you carry—and which parts are you choosing to reclaim?
If you enjoy books like the Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, you might also enjoy the following:
- Passing by Nella Larsen
- Caucasia by Danzy Senna
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
- What the Fireflies Knew by Kai Harris
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Peggy Arthur 