Her boss fires her for her carelessness, making it hard for Desiree and Stella to survive on their own. One day, Stella isn’t paying attention and almost gets her hand caught in the laundry press. In New Orleans, Desiree and Stella find work in a laundromat, though they’re not technically old enough to have jobs. At the end of the summer, the twins set out on the night of the Founder’s Day dance, when everyone in town is preoccupied. She doesn’t say anything about it, but the traumatic experience is enough to make her go along with Desiree’s idea for them to run away to New Orleans. Unbeknownst to Desiree and Adele, the father of this rich family sexually abuses Stella.
But her dream falls flat when her mother, Adele, takes her and Desiree out of school and sends them to work as housecleaners for a rich white family in the neighboring town of Opelousas. She’s extremely smart, dreaming of someday going to college. In their sophomore year of high school, Stella spends her free time teaching younger students. Desiree is bold and independent, whereas Stella is shy and reserved. This experience binds the twins together in their trauma.ĭesiree and Stella are very close. Although the Black people of Mallard have carved out a space for themselves, they still live under the constant threat of racism-as made clear by the fact that Leon Vignes, Desiree and Stella’s father, is brutally murdered by a racist mob of angry white men. It’s frowned upon in Mallard to marry dark-skinned people, since everyone has colorist ideas and values light skin tones. They grow up in Mallard, Louisiana, a town that consists entirely of light-skinned Black people.
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