Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker, in a poor district of south Chicago known as the Levee, on April 13, 1891 (though Larsen would frequently claim to have been born in 1893).[2]: 15, 64 Her mother was Pederline Marie Hansen, an ethnically Danish immigrant, probably born in 1868, possibly in Schleswig-Holstein.[2]: 17–18 Migrating to the USA around 1886 and going by the name Mary, Larsen's mother worked as a seamstress and domestic worker in Chicago.[2]: 18 She died in 1951 in Santa Monica, Los Angeles County.[2]: 472 [3]
Larsen's father was Peter Walker, believed to be a mixed-race Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies. Walker and Hansen obtained a marriage license in 1890, but may never have married.[2]: 20 Walker was probably a descendant on his paternal side of Henry or George Walker, white men from Albany, New York, who were known to have settled in the Danish West Indies in about 1840.[2]: 19–20 In the Danish West Indies, the law did not recognise racial difference, and racial lines were more fluid than in the former slave states of the United States. Walker may never have identified as "Negro."[2]: 19–20 He soon disappeared from the lives of Nella and her mother; she said he had died when she was very young. At this time, Chicago was filled with immigrants, but the Great Migration of blacks from the South had not begun. Near the end of Walker's childhood, the black population of the city was 1.3% in 1890 and 2% in 1910.[2]: 15–16
Marie then married Peter Larsen (aka Larson, b. 1867), a fellow Danish immigrant. In 1892 the couple had a daughter, Anna Elizabeth, also known as Lizzie (married name Gardner).[3] Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled Nellye Larson and Nellie Larsen, before settling finally on Nella Larsen.[4] The mixed family moved west to a mostly white neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants, but encountered discrimination because of Nella. When Nella was eight years old, they moved a few blocks back east.
The American author and critic Darryl Pinckney wrote of her anomalous situation:
as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.[3]
From 1895 to 1898, Larsen lived in Denmark with her mother and her half-sister.[2]: 31 While she was unusual in Denmark because of being of mixed race, she had some good memories from that time, including playing Danish children’s games, which she later wrote about in English. After returning to Chicago in 1898, she attended a large public school. At the same time as the migration of Southern blacks increased to the city, so had European immigration. Racial segregation and tensions had increased in the immigrant neighborhoods, where both groups competed for jobs and housing.
Her mother believed that education could give Larsen an opportunity and supported her in attending Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. A student there in 1907–08, for the first time Larsen was living within an African-American community, but she was still separated by her own background and life experiences from most of the students, who were primarily from the South, with most descended from former slaves. Biographer George B. Hutchinson established that Larsen was expelled, along with ten other women, inferring that this was for some violation of Fisk's strict dress or conduct codes for women.[2]: 62–63 Larsen went on her own to Denmark, where she lived for a total of three years, between 1909 and 1912, and attended the University of Copenhagen.[5] After returning to the United States, she continued to struggle to find a place where she could belong.[3]
