Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana, is a liminal “third place”. Established in 1848, it is inhabited by light-skinned African Americans “who would never be white but refused to be treated like Negroes”. In 1938 it’s the birthplace of “creamy skinned, hazel eyed” identical twins, Stella and Desiree Vignes.
Throughout the opening of this epic novel, Brit Bennett presents the townsfolk as protective of Mallard’s unique constituency. Those within the community marry to maintain the lightness of bloodlines and to ensure that “the darkest ones [are] no swarthier than a Greek”. With a judicious hand, Bennett outlines how this regulating of racial purity comes with no small measure of emotional cruelty. This, and the wider conservatism and privations of provincial life, encourages the twins to run away to the relative freedoms of 1950s New Orleans.
The girls are convincingly characterised as polar opposites. Stella is bookish, biddable and somewhat dependent on her twin. Desiree is more headstrong and spirited. As they make their perilous way in the Big Easy, their unity is unsettled. Stella soon deserts Desiree, disappearing into a life in which she constructs a new identity and “passes” as white. Bennett’s second novel following 2016’s The Mothers largely occupies itself with the consequences of this radical move, which play out through the subsequent generation. With a brisk confidence, the narrative moves between periods, following the twins and their offspring from the 50s to the late 80s. Indeed, among the novel’s great technical accomplishments are the parallels it draws between characters’ experiences across the decades. Stella and Desiree’s struggles are elegantly and inventively echoed in the future challenges encountered by their children.
While Desiree’s trajectory is rendered with tenderness, Stella’s decision to forge an existence in which she capitalises on her Caucasian features is the novel’s linchpin. It also draws attention to the dangerous value system within black communities that prizes lightness for its proximity to the authority of whiteness. Equally, Stella’s concerted efforts to “masquerade” as white to gain safety and opportunity underline how rigorously these things were – and still are – denied to people of colour. These aspects of racial politics have long been explored in US fiction. With a panoptic view, Toni Morrison interrogated the pernicious effects of colourism throughout her oeuvre. Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes captured with candour the compromised lives of black people purporting to be white.
Bennett is influenced by these forebears, but she is not intimidated by previous literary incarnations of “passing”: her depiction of Stella brings fresh sensitivity to the trope. The portrayal of Stella’s rejection of her mixed ethnicity is figured, in part, as a sign of trauma; it is a response to the horrific act of racialised violence that indelibly marks the twins’ childhood. Bennett shows us that, for Stella, whiteness presents itself as an irrefutable, unquestionably potent force – whether in the assassination of Martin Luther King or in the furore caused by a black family attempting to move into the all-white LA neighbourhood where Stella and her husband live in the 60s. It possesses a profound potential to both protect those within its fold and destroy those beyond it; these qualities prove irresistible to a weakened and fragile individual in search of security and solidity. Bennett’s rendering of Stella’s roiling emotions about having to “act white” at all times in case some trace of her origins emerges is powerful, too. Images and subplots associated with this performative aspect of identity are prevalent in the text. We regularly find ourselves in the company of shapeshifting drag queens, a chameleon-like bounty hunter, extravagant soap stars, theatrical estate agents. Some might find this repeated allusion to the theme of pretence grinding or overly emphatic. For me, it mirrored the daily self-policing and continuous effort required in order for Stella to maintain her facade.
Bennett is a gifted storyteller. This generous, humane novel has many merits, not least its engrossing plot and richly detailed settings, from smoky small-town diners to gleaming laboratories. The handling of Stella’s secret struggles is, however, an especial achievement. Stella’s lie takes her into a deep and jagged introspection that threatens the life she has so painstakingly built. Yet the novel proves to be a timely testament to the redemptive powers of community, connection and looking beyond the self.