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Quicksand

Nella Larsen's first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's own early life. Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home.

Her travels bring her in contact with many of the communities which Larsen knew. The reader meets Helga, a first-year teacher in "Naxos," a Southern Negro boarding school based on Tuskegee University, where she finds herself dissatisfied with the complacent philosophy of those around her. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher who advocates that blacks ought to sensibly segregate themselves into black schools, that striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Helga abruptly quits her teaching and moves to Chicago, where her white uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Then she goes to Harlem, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem."

Taking her uncle's legacy and advice, she visits her aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic. Realizing that she deeply misses seeing Negro people, she returns to New York City. Experiencing a near mental breakdown, Helga happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After seducing and marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the poor Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's blind adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Helga Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for much more than simply how to synthesize her own mixed ancestry--she expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends see as genetic differences between races.

Among the characters described is a light complected intellectual professional woman of colour who is named Audrey Denny. Denny is seen as a scandal by some of Helgas friends because of her unwillingness to accept convention as either a woman of colour or a woman. She openly socializes with people of all colours both in private and public. Audrey Denny is believed by biographers of Nella Larsen to have been based on Anita Thompson Dickinson later Reynolds.

The novel also tells the tale of Helga's search for a marriage partner: as it opens, she has become engaged to marry for social benefits a prestigious Southern Negro man she does not really love; in Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons; by the final chapters she has seduced and married a stereotypical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic, as Helga Crane sees what she hoped would be sexual fulfillment and success of her altruistic ideas of "uplifting" the poor southern blacks she lives among, turn into an endless chain of pregnancies and suffering. Helga becomes disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, and fantasizes about leaving her husband, but she is never able to.