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Part III: Heartlines (1968)
Chapter Seven
Summary: Chapter Seven
On the same night Desiree returned to Mallard, a Housing Association for the Palace Estates (a subdivision in Brentwood, a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood) meets to discuss the possibility of the Lawsons’ home being sold to a Black family. Stella Sanders, typically shy, voices her outrage, surprising everyone at the meeting, including her husband, Blake. Stella and Blake met in New Orleans when Stella was Blake’s secretary. Unlike Stella and Desiree, Blake came from a wealthy white family in Boston. Stella and Blake have been married eight years, but Stella still finds herself feeling slightly ashamed by how cliché the story of how they met was.
When they return home the evening of the meeting, Blake assures Stella that the association will make sure that a Black family does not move into the neighborhood. The situation makes Stella anxious. When she was a girl in Mallard, she once passed as white and entered through the main entrance of the South Louisiana Museum of Art. She moved through the museum seamlessly, not worried that she would get in trouble for being Black. Stella was startled, however, when a Black security guard winked and acknowledged her. This terrified Stella, and she remembered Adele explaining that people always recognize their own people. Stella worries that if a Black family moves into their neighborhood, they will recognize her as passing and reveal her secret to everyone.
The night after the Housing Association meeting, Stella is awakened by her daughter, Kennedy, screaming from a nightmare. Stella comforts Kennedy, telling her that when she was young she also had nightmares. Stella does not tell Kennedy, however, that her dreams were about the night when her father was lynched by white men. While Stella was pregnant with Kennedy, she worried about what would happen if she gave birth to a dark-skinned child. Stella was relieved when she gave birth to a white, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed girl. When asked about her past, Stella always lies. To Blake and Kennedy, Stella is an only child who moved to New Orleans after her parents died. Stella prefers that they believe her past before Blake was tragic, and thus, a topic not open for discussion.
The following morning, Stella floats in her pool while drinking a gin and soda, still shaken by the possibility of a Black family moving into the neighborhood. Stella constantly has to remind herself that this is in fact her life. During the summer that Desiree and Stella cleaned the Duponts’ house, Stella could not fathom ever being able to afford the expensive things that they had. That same summer, Mr. Dupont raped Stella multiple times. Stella feared Mr. Dupont violating her again, so when Desiree came up with the plan to leave Mallard after Founder’s Day, Stella agreed. Stella never told anyone about what happened with Mr. Dupont.
Now in Los Angeles, Stella’s life is opulent and comfortable, but uneventful. That afternoon Stella attends a PTA meeting at Brentwood Academy. These meetings bore Stella, who is annoyed by the dull conversations about baking cookies and discussions about their children’s accomplishments. The other mothers find Stella standoffish, not aware that Stella feels nervous around white women. After the meeting ends, Cath Johansen commends Stella for speaking out at the association meeting the night before. Blake suggests that Stella and Cath could become good friends.
The following week, the Lawsons’ house is sold. Stella learns that the Black man who purchased the house was only able to do so after he threatened to sue the association for discrimination. Stella finds it inconceivable that someone would want to live somewhere they aren’t wanted. Two weeks prior, Stella watched riots across the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She hid her tears from Blake, who made a disparaging comment about the protestors fighting for equality. Stella’s husband and neighbors might have seen King as an impressive speaker, Stella thought, but they would not want him living in their neighborhood. One night during dinner Stella is unnerved to hear Dale, Cath, and Blake discuss plans to prevent the Black family from moving to their neighborhood.
Days later, Stella watches as her new neighbors, the Walkers, arrive. One day, after weeks of avoiding her neighbors, she meets Loretta Walker in passing. She plays the encounter over and over in her head, suspicious of why Loretta felt comfortable enough to speak to her. That night Stella tells Blake that she met one of the new neighbors.
Analysis: Chapter Seven
I n Part III, the reader sees Stella’s life as an adult woman, and the novel begins to more deeply explore the theme of passing. Racial passing stories have been a part of American literature from the antebellum period through the civil rights movement and beyond. Historically, these narratives end tragically for the character who attempts to pass, and in that way, the works have often punished Black characters who pass as white. Though these narratives may call into question some ideas about fixed racial categories and stereotypes, their power to reenvision race in America is somewhat limited by the fact that they often depict a return to a fraught racial “normal.” The Vanishing Half reimagines the passing narrative through Stella’s character. She successfully passes as white and builds her entire adult life as a white person, even though it’s painful for her to be estranged from her Black family and to never be fully honest with her white family. Through Stella’s character, Bennett destabilizes fixed ideas about race, identity, and personal history. Throughout the novel, Stella is molded and moved by the tremendous forces that impact both races in often conflicting ways.
This section of the novel is set against the backdrop of the 1960s, when America’s fixed ideas about race were being upended by the civil rights movement. As Stella grapples with what it means for her to have a Black family move into her white neighborhood, Bennett provides insight into the historical forces that shaped Stella’s decision to pass as white. As a child and teenager, Stella grew up in the South under the Jim Crow laws, which legalized racial segregation. The horrors of the Jim Crow South, in which Black Americans endured terrible abuse and were treated as second-class citizens, are written in the history of Stella’s family as well: her father was murdered by white men, and she was sexually assaulted by her white employer when she worked as a house cleaner. As she grows up to be a wealthy white woman with a cleaner of her own, Stella witnesses the nation’s racial reckoning in the wake of the Watts Riots and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination from a unique vantage point: as a white woman among white people fretting over the desegregation of their neighborhood. Stella escaped a life as a Black girl that she found confining and incomprehensibly tragic. Thirteen years later, as a white woman, Stella reenacts racial bias on other Black people to prevent them from accessing the freedoms she now enjoys.
This chapter illustrates that Stella is also haunted by the past. Just once, Stella tells her daughter the name of the town she came from. That she reveals the name even though it could have potentially dangerous ramifications suggests that she can’t stop herself from saying it aloud. Stella misses Desiree, and as time marches on, her speculations about how her sister feels in the rapidly changing world are as close as she can get to actually knowing Desiree in the present. She reflects that her life feels like a hall of mirrors that Desiree once took her to, and she has a ghostly memory of turning to look for her sister and finding only her own face staring back at her. In their current lives, both twins are haunted by their sister’s absence, and neither feels fully inside of their life because a part of them is always reaching for the other.
