Quicksand

1928, 1994 Rutgers University Press edition, with Passing in the same volume
Nella Larsen
Quicksand
Original price unknown, bought used for $7.50
Worn paperback
B

Imagine if Carol Kennicott had been half Danish, half Negro.  Further imagine that instead of marrying a doctor who believes in birth control she had wed a preacher who believes that large families are sent by God.  And finally, imagine that she was less pretentious and more sensual.  Then you'd have the tragedy of Helga Crane, who fits in nowhere and eventually sinks into the quicksand of the place she's least suited for.  When I first read the book, I hoped that Helga would return to Denmark.  She's treated as an exotic there but at least she's closer to happiness than at the Naxos (anagram for "Saxon") school or in the upper-class Negro set in Harlem, let alone her final destination.  One of the bleakest final sentences in women's fiction is this one, after Helga's gone through a rough childbirth and wonders how she can escape her marriage without abandoning her children, as her father abandoned her:  "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child."

While it's clear that Helga's life is sad and wasted, Larsen, herself the daughter of a Danish mother and a black father, is tougher on her than Lewis was on Carol.  She's honest about it when Helga Crane (she often uses the full name) is vain, shallow, or inconsiderate.  The narrator doesn't have to say anything, but Helga's own thoughts accuse her.  I appreciate that Helga doesn't have to be a saint to be oppressed.  Whether it's bigotry, assimilationism, or Christianity, Larsen opposes the forces that want to mute Helga's vibrancy.

I think the thing that's most remarkable about this book is how it describes color, not just the wide range of "blackness," but the hues of clothing and furnishings.  The stages of Helga's life are shown in the colors she wears, with the bright hues of Denmark too loud for New York.  Ironically, her husband is named Pleasant Green.  And of course Helga must deal with being both black and white, and somehow neither.