Quicksand

by

Nella Larsen

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The story’s protagonist. Helga is a young biracial woman who is half-black and half-white. Helga was raised as a racial outsider by her white mother’s new white family after her black father abandoned her. The story begins after Helga’s parents have died, and she is a 23-year-old teacher about to quit her job at Naxos, a school for young black women in the South. Helga ultimately decides to leave Naxos (and her fiancé, James Vayle) and move to Chicago, where her Uncle Peter lives. From this point on, the story tracks Helga’s life as she continuously moves around to new places. Her life is marred by her attempt to fit in somewhere, but she always feels like an outsider. In Chicago, Helga is turned away by Uncle Peter’s new wife, Mrs. Nilssen, because Helga is half-black. She then finds a job helping a woman named Mrs. Hayes-Rore write a speech, and ends up moving to Harlem, New York and living with Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s niece, Anne. Here, Helga develops complicated romantic feelings for Dr. Anderson, the former principal at Naxos who has also moved to New York City. Helga feels insecure and too white for Harlem, however, so she moves to Copenhagen, Denmark to live with her white aunt and uncle, Fru and Herr Dahl. In Copenhagen, Helga is admired for her beauty but also exoticized and objectified for being black, an uncomfortable situation which causes her to reject the marriage proposal of Axel Olsen, a wealthy artist commissioned to paint her portrait. Continuing her pattern of repressed racial shame and running away from her feelings, Helga returns to Harlem, where Dr. Anderson is now married to Anne. Faced once more with her messy feelings for Dr. Anderson, Helga meets a man named Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green and impulsively marries him in another attempt to escape her shame and difficult emotions. The couple moves to rural Alabama and has five children, and the story ends with Helga giving up on her lifelong attempt to find a place where she belongs—she is too worn down by age and illness to escape her miserable existence of poverty and perpetual childbearing in Alabama. Larsen leverages Helga’s story to capture the difficulties of living as a mixed-race woman in early 20th-century American and European societies. Through Helga’s eyes, Larsen criticizes aspects of these societies that she believes impinge on social progress, including binary race categories, religion, white superiority, white mimicry, objectification of the black female body, and segregation.

Helga Crane Quotes in Quicksand

The Quicksand quotes below are all either spoken by Helga Crane or refer to Helga Crane. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Race, Segregation, and Society Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Preacher
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine. It was now a showplace in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the black man’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it. It was, Helga decided, now only a big knife with a cruelly sharp edge ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“And please at least try to act like ladies and not savages from the backwoods.”

Related Characters: Miss MacGooden (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“Bright colors are vulgar”—"Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people”—"Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow or red.”

Related Characters: Dean of Women (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“And please remember my husband is not your uncle. No indeed! Why, that would make me your aunt!”

Related Characters: Mrs. Nilssen (speaker), Helga Crane, Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter)
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:

She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their live, at all costs to be hidden.

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter) , Mrs. Nilssen
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“Our kind of work wouldn’t do for you” […] “Domestic mostly.”

Related Characters: Ida Ross (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Hayes-Rore (Aunt Jeannette) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Of that white world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference. No, not at all did she crave, from those pale and powerful people, awareness. Sinister folk, she considered them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past contribution to her life, which had been but shame and grief, she had hidden from away from brown folk in a locked closet, “never,” she told herself, “to be reopened.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

She hated white people with a deep and burning hatred[.] […] But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living. While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she yet disliked the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Anne Grey
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:

Until the very moment of his entrance she had had no intention of running away, but something, some imp of contumacy, drove her from his presence, though she longed to stay. Again abruptly had come the uncontrollable wish to wound. Later, with a sense of helplessness and inevitability, she realized that the weapon which she had chosen had been a boomerang, for she herself had felt the keep disappointment of the denial.

Related Characters: Robert Anderson (Dr. Anderson) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Characteristically she writhed at the idea of telling Anne of her impending departure and shirked the problem of evolving a plausible and inoffensive excuse for its suddenness. “That,” she decided lazily, “will have to look out for itself; I can’t be bothered just now. It’s too hot.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Anne Grey , Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter)
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair, straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces. Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semibarbaric, sophisticated, and exotic, were here. But she was blind to its charm, purposely aloof and a little contemptuous, and soon her interest in the moving mosaic waned.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

“Why, she gives parties for white and colored people together. And she goes to white people’s parties. It’s worse than disgusting, it’s positively obscene.”

Related Characters: Anne Grey (speaker), Helga Crane, Audrey Denney
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“Oh, I’m an old married lady, and a Dane. But you, you’re young. And you’re a foreigner, and different. You must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things. You must make an impression. “

Related Characters: Fru Dahl (Aunt Katrina) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

A decoration. A curio. A peacock.

Related Characters: Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen) (speaker), Helga Crane, Fru Dahl (Aunt Katrina) , Herr Dahl (Uncle Poul)
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t care at all to be owned. Even by you.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen)
Page Number: 117
Explanation and Analysis:

“I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a tragedy.”

Related Characters: Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen) (speaker), Helga Crane
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:

It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen)
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

Even with Clementine Richards, a strapping black beauty of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold shining eyes of jetlike hardness. A person of awesome appearance.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green , Clementine Richards
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

“Jes’ remembah…we all gits ouah res’ by an’ by. In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’.”

Related Characters: Sary Jones (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

Audrey Denney, placid, taking quietly and without fuss the things which she wanted.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Audrey Denney
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Religion had, after all, its uses. It blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its crudest truths. Especially it had its uses for the poor—and the blacks.

For the blacks. The Negroes.

And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this childlike trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in “kingdom come.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 159-150
Explanation and Analysis:

And hardly 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.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 159-150
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Quicksand LitChart as a printable PDF.
Quicksand PDF

Helga Crane Quotes in Quicksand

The Quicksand quotes below are all either spoken by Helga Crane or refer to Helga Crane. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Race, Segregation, and Society Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Preacher
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine. It was now a showplace in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the black man’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it. It was, Helga decided, now only a big knife with a cruelly sharp edge ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“And please at least try to act like ladies and not savages from the backwoods.”

Related Characters: Miss MacGooden (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“Bright colors are vulgar”—"Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people”—"Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow or red.”

Related Characters: Dean of Women (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“And please remember my husband is not your uncle. No indeed! Why, that would make me your aunt!”

Related Characters: Mrs. Nilssen (speaker), Helga Crane, Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter)
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:

She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their live, at all costs to be hidden.

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter) , Mrs. Nilssen
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“Our kind of work wouldn’t do for you” […] “Domestic mostly.”

Related Characters: Ida Ross (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Hayes-Rore (Aunt Jeannette) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Of that white world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference. No, not at all did she crave, from those pale and powerful people, awareness. Sinister folk, she considered them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past contribution to her life, which had been but shame and grief, she had hidden from away from brown folk in a locked closet, “never,” she told herself, “to be reopened.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

She hated white people with a deep and burning hatred[.] […] But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living. While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she yet disliked the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Anne Grey
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:

Until the very moment of his entrance she had had no intention of running away, but something, some imp of contumacy, drove her from his presence, though she longed to stay. Again abruptly had come the uncontrollable wish to wound. Later, with a sense of helplessness and inevitability, she realized that the weapon which she had chosen had been a boomerang, for she herself had felt the keep disappointment of the denial.

Related Characters: Robert Anderson (Dr. Anderson) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Characteristically she writhed at the idea of telling Anne of her impending departure and shirked the problem of evolving a plausible and inoffensive excuse for its suddenness. “That,” she decided lazily, “will have to look out for itself; I can’t be bothered just now. It’s too hot.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Anne Grey , Peter Nilssen (Uncle Peter)
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black hair, straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair, crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces. Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semibarbaric, sophisticated, and exotic, were here. But she was blind to its charm, purposely aloof and a little contemptuous, and soon her interest in the moving mosaic waned.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

“Why, she gives parties for white and colored people together. And she goes to white people’s parties. It’s worse than disgusting, it’s positively obscene.”

Related Characters: Anne Grey (speaker), Helga Crane, Audrey Denney
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“Oh, I’m an old married lady, and a Dane. But you, you’re young. And you’re a foreigner, and different. You must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things. You must make an impression. “

Related Characters: Fru Dahl (Aunt Katrina) (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

A decoration. A curio. A peacock.

Related Characters: Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen) (speaker), Helga Crane, Fru Dahl (Aunt Katrina) , Herr Dahl (Uncle Poul)
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t care at all to be owned. Even by you.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane (speaker), Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen)
Page Number: 117
Explanation and Analysis:

“I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a tragedy.”

Related Characters: Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen) (speaker), Helga Crane
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:

It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Herr Axel Olsen (Herr Olsen)
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

Even with Clementine Richards, a strapping black beauty of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold shining eyes of jetlike hardness. A person of awesome appearance.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green , Clementine Richards
Related Symbols: Portrait
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

“Jes’ remembah…we all gits ouah res’ by an’ by. In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’.”

Related Characters: Sary Jones (speaker), Helga Crane
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

Audrey Denney, placid, taking quietly and without fuss the things which she wanted.

Related Characters: Helga Crane, Audrey Denney
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Religion had, after all, its uses. It blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its crudest truths. Especially it had its uses for the poor—and the blacks.

For the blacks. The Negroes.

And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this childlike trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in “kingdom come.”

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 159-150
Explanation and Analysis:

And hardly 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.

Related Characters: Helga Crane
Page Number: 159-150
Explanation and Analysis: