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.
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.
“And please at least try to act like ladies and not savages from the backwoods.”
“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.”
“And please remember my husband is not your uncle. No indeed! Why, that would make me your aunt!”
She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their live, at all costs to be hidden.
“Our kind of work wouldn’t do for you” […] “Domestic mostly.”
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
“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. “
A decoration. A curio. A peacock.
“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.”
“I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a tragedy.”
It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features.
Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?
Even with Clementine Richards, a strapping black beauty of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold shining eyes of jetlike hardness. A person of awesome appearance.
“Jes’ remembah…we all gits ouah res’ by an’ by. In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’.”
Audrey Denney, placid, taking quietly and without fuss the things which she wanted.
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.”
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.
