Quicksand Nella Larsen(1928)
The first of two novels by NELLALARSEN.Quick-
sandis a compelling story about a young woman
who strives to claim a place for herself. There are
autobiographical undertones in the novel, whose
protagonist teaches at, lives in, and travels to loca-
tions to which Larsen herself had ties.
The story of Helga Crane, a 22-year-old lonely
mixed-race woman, begins in NAXOS, a college in
the Black Belt. Crane, born of a white mother and a
father of African descent, is a teacher at the school
whose location, with rearranged letters, reveals the
degree to which Anglo-Saxon, ideas hold sway.
Helga, who does not forge friendships with her fellow
teachers and sequesters herself in her richly textured
and decorated private rooms, ultimately leaves the
school in a rage, unable to overcome what she re-
gards as limitations on her own self-development.
She travels to CHICAGOand obtains employment
that takes her to HARLEM. There, under the watch-
ful eye of Mrs. Jeanette Hayes-Rore, she attempts to
meld into upper-middle-class African-American so-
ciety. Her patron, however, advises her to suppress
the facts of her mixed ancestry, specifically the de-
tails about her white lineage. She becomes close to
Anne Grey, a widow who provides Helga with fur-
ther opportunities to move in African-American cir-
cles. The alliance with Mrs. Grey begins to unravel,
however, when Helga tires of the woman’s vocal an-
tipathy toward whites despite her efforts to emulate
white social practices and fashions.
The arrival of a $5,000 check from her mater-
nal white relatives saves Helga from the increas-
ingly suffocating Harlem network in which she
finds herself. She uses the money to finance a visit,
and potential permanent relocation, to Denmark.
Once there, however, instead of having to suppress
her white identity, she finds her African origins
highlighted dramatically. She attracts a great deal
of attention because of her African origins and is
regarded as a fascinating exotic. Her family
prompts her to dress in vivid colors that accentu-
ate her difference from the majority of Danish peo-
ple, and Helga struggles now to take control of her
body and projected self-image. An accomplished
artist, Axel Olsen, is in love with her, but Helga re-
fuses to marry him. She is concerned, in part, that
despite his promises of love he eventually will turn
on her and despise her because of her race. Helga
leaves Denmark with a sharper sense of how race
and identity are both manipulated and malleable;
she has an epiphany about her own father’s hunger
for restorative racial environments and ties.
Shortly after her return to Harlem, Helga
Crane marries the Reverend Green, a minister
whom she meets in a storefront church. The cou-
ple relocates to Alabama, but Helga’s speedy
repatriation into the African-American world
does not bode well. She begins to suffocate under
the burdens of childbearing, motherhood, and do-
mestic responsibilities. The final scenes of the
book reveal that she is pregnant with her fifth
child soon after the birth of her fourth; Helga is a
woman with no control over her body. The novel
closes with the specter of Helga’s demise rather
than her restoration, a woman suffering in a
racial and personal quagmire from which there
may be no escape.436