Being a Twin
A great deal of imagery is put to use describing the experience of having a twin. This should only be expected since the novel is about the divergent adult lives of a pair of twin runaway teenage girls.
“Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself. That person existed for everyone, probably, an alternative self that lived only in the mind. But hers was real. Stella rolled over in bed each morning and looked into her eyes. Other times it felt like living with a foreigner. Why are you not more like me? she’d think, glancing over at Desiree. How did I become me and you become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked.”
Hey Jude…Hey, Stella!
While working part-time for a catering company, Desiree’s daughter Jude acts as if she’s seen a ghost. She is so spooked by what she sees across a crowded a room, in fact, that she drops a bottle of wine to the floor and is subsequently fired. In a way, she does see a ghost: a woman who looks exactly like her mother. For which, of course, there is only one explanation, but even that explanation seems a little crazy. Either way, Jude can’t get the imagery out of her mind:
“It couldn’t be Stella. For years after that Beverly Hills party, Jude had thought of little else. Sometimes the woman in the fur coat looked exactly like her mother, down to the curve in her smile. Other times, she was only slender and dark-haired, a passing resemblance at best. After all, she’d only caught a glimpse of the woman before the wine splashed against her leg. Then she was scrambling to pick up the shattered glass while the whole party gawked.”
A Different Sort of Lynching
The father of the twins, Leon Vignes, is born into a family of men suffering from one really bad luck streak in dancing school. Four brothers, including Leon, and not a single one lives to see their thirtieth birthday. Leon suffers the indignity of being lynched not once, but twice. The self-described representatives of the superior race somehow failed to rise to the intellectual supremacy required to figure out when a man has been successfully beaten to death. The beating was horrific, but not quite fatal; aspect of a lynching would have to be completed in a hospital:
“That night, he was whittling a table leg when five white men kicked in the front door and hauled him outside. He landed hard on his face, his mouth filling with dirt and blood. The mob leader—a tall white man with red gold hair like a fall apple—waved a crumpled note in which, he claimed, Leon had written nasty things to a white woman. Leon couldn’t read or write—his customers knew that he made all of his marks with an X—but the white men stomped on his hands, broke every finger and joint, then shot him four times.”
Pretty Blonde Privilege
Kennedy lives much of her life not even realizing that her grandfather was one of the countless black men delivered white man’s justice. Indeed, why should she ever consider this possibility for a second. After all, she has grown up enjoying all the spoils of being a pretty white blonde girl:
“Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of gifts she hadn’t deserved.”
