It’s a sobering end showing that women, regardless of education and connections, actually have few outcomes available to them. The novella ends when she finds herself in a situation she cannot leave. Whenever she finds somewhere she thinks she fits – and Larsen moves her between black and white society – she is eventually disabused of her feelings, often through the behaviour of those around her. Colored people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business. I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. After weeks of unemployment, she finds a job with a woman, Mrs Hayes-Rore, who gives speeches on ‘the race problem’ before moving to New York to live with a relative of Mrs Hayes-Rore’s. In keeping with the title of the book, Helga’s situation changes seemingly quickly again and again. In a veiled conversation, it’s implied that the issue is that Helga’s mother had her out of wedlock to a white man. Arriving in Chicago, she goes to the home of her uncle, her deceased mother’s brother, but is rejected by his wife who denies any connection between Helga and her husband. Although she is unaware of the form happiness might take for her. Helga leaves Naxos and the south in search of happiness. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody has ever heard, it was presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous and conformable. You could be queer, or even attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville in other words, if you had a family. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t “belong”. Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. Helga, however, ‘…could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity’. Her fiancé has ‘naturalized’, fitting into the school and its values.

Helga’s out of favour at the school and urgently wishes to leave despite her engagement to a colleague. Helga Crane is twenty-three and a teacher at Naxos, ‘the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country’.

They both share the key theme of being a woman of colour in America early in the twentieth century but the two pieces explore ideas around this in different ways. Quicksand and Passing are two novellas packaged together and reissued by Serpent’s Tale in the UK.

Nella larsen quicksand