Each generation lighter than the one before. 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. He’d married a mulatto even lighter than himself. Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. Maybe that’s what made him first dream of the town. His mother, rest her soul, had hated his lightness when he was a boy, she’d shoved him under the sun, begging him to darken. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him. A town that, like any other, was more idea than place. Mallard, named after the ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes.

She was hurrying, her head bent, and- Lou paused here, a bit of a showman- she was holding the hand of a girl, seven or eight, and black as tar. Her hipless body reminding him of a branch caught in a strong breeze. It concerns the half of everyone that disappears once we leave home love or hate the place, love or hate ourselves.

She looked exactly the same as when she’d left at sixteen- still light, her skin the color of sand barely wet. The Vanishing Half speaks ultimately of a universal vanishing. But that morning in April 1968, on his way to work, Lou spotted Desiree Vignes walking along Partridge Road, carrying a small leather suitcase. In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared. The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they’d been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they’d witnessed something truly exciting. The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.

The vanished half