Quicksand

by Nella Larsen

  Copyright

  Introduction copyright © 2006 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1928. We have provided a new Introduction specially for this edition.

  International Standard Book Number

  9780486116846

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  45140204

  www.doverpublications.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

  Introduction

  YOU can probably get a pretty good idea of Nella Larsen’s personality from the depiction of her alter ego, Helga Crane, in Quicksand: An inward-looking woman, sometimes quiet, sometimes indignant, sometimes envious of other people’s possessions, and always a little insecure and suspicious—that is the way Helga Crane comes across, and evidently it was the way Nella Larsen came across as well. According to her biographer, Thadious M. Davis, some acquaintances thought her aloof or standoffish. “An outer mask disguised her anxieties about belonging.... Although loneliness and pain would occasionally pierce her haughty façade, she was, as an old friend tactfully put it, ‘a good pretender.’ ”1 But why was she forced to be a good pretender? What was it that had made her so anxious about belonging? Much of her life is shrouded in mystery. About her early years, in particular, we possess only a few facts, gleaned mostly from Davis’s assiduous researches. Even Davis could not manage fully to shed light on Larsen’s childhood. But it seems clear that, simply because of the color of her skin, Larsen was rejected by her own family—the very people who should have loved her most.

  What we know is that she was born in 1891 in Chicago—as “Nellie Walker”—to Marie Hanson, a white Danish seamstress, and Peter Walker, a laborer from the Danish West Indies. Walker apparently died when she was about two, and in 1894 her mother got married again, this time to a white Dane named Peter Larson—with whom, as it happens, she had already had, a year earlier, a little white daughter named Anna.2 A white family with one dark-skinned daughter—in the United States in the 1890s, this clearly would have been a matter of some discomfiture and embarrassment. So what were these fine white folks to do, what did they do, with little Nellie?

  Well, in the census of 1900, a Nellie Larson is listed as a child inmate of the Erring Woman’s Refuge in Chicago. Most likely this was Nella, but how long she had been left in that institution, we do not know. In 1901 she belatedly started attending public school in Chicago, and in 1907 Peter Larson sent her to Fisk University’s Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee. But in the spring of 1908, following a visit from her mother, she left there again, and from that point on seems to have been permanently alienated from her family. The next four years are pretty much a blank. According to her own later statements, she spent three years in Copenhagen, living with relatives of her mother and auditing classes at the University of Copenhagen. It seems reasonable to accept that account—but no records have been found to corroborate or expand on it.

  In 1912, at any rate, she was definitely in the United States, in New York, training to be a nurse. After three years of training, she worked for a year at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but in 1916 she took a nursing post in New York. This is where she met Elmer Samuel Imes, a physicist, whom she married in 1919, and where she began her acquaintance with people in the burgeoning arts movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. She began doing some writing and in 1921 left her nursing job to attend Columbia University’s School of Library Service and work at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, her writing attracted the attention of Walter White, the assistant executive secretary of the NAACP, and Carl Van Vechten, the white writer and photographer who was such a tireless promoter of African-American authors. White encouraged Larsen to finish Quicksand, and when it was done, Van Vechten introduced it to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Knopf brought it out in 1928, and W. E. B. Du Bois praised it as the “best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt.” The following year, Larsen’s novel Passing was published, and in 1930 she became the first African-American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to Europe to work on her next novel (never published). She traveled alone; her husband had taken a position at Fisk, and had fallen in love with another woman—who, to rub salt in the wound, happened to be white.

  In 1933 she divorced Imes. She also began withdrawing from her acquaintances, and four years later she severed her Harlem ties for good. In April of 1937, she told a few of her remaining friends that she was about to embark on a cruise to South America, and one night that fall she called several friends with the same puzzling message: “I arrive at once!”—after which they never heard from her again. “She is way past my under-tanding,” wrote a friend.3

  What a sad, lonely life she seems to have had. After her “arrive at once” vanishing act she kept writing, but never published again. She lived on the $150 alimony Imes paid her every month, and after his death in 1941 went back to nursing, first at Gouverneur Hospital in Manhattan and then at Metropolitan Hospital.

  In 1963, Larsen made a trip to California, hoping to make contact with her half sister, Anna Larsen Gardner. On her return to New York, she hinted that Anna had refused to see her. She went into an acute depression. And at the end of March, 1964, she died in her apartment, alone. When Anna Gardner was informed that she was Nella Larsen’s sole heir, she expressed surprise. “Why, I didn’t know that I had a sister,” she said.4

  T. N. R. ROGERS

  FOR E. S. I.

  My old man died in a fine big house.

  My ma died in a shack.

  I wonder where I’m gonna die,

  Being neither white nor black?

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  ONE

  HELGA CRANE sat alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the evening, was in soft gloom. Only a single reading lamp, dimmed by a great black and red shade, made a pool of light on the blue Chinese carpet, on the bright covers of the books which she had taken down from their long shelves, on the white pages of the opened one selected, on the shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums beside her on the low table, and on the oriental silk which covered the stool at her slim feet. It was a comfortable room, furnished with rare and intensely personal taste, flooded with Southern sun in the day, but shadowy just then with the drawn curtains and single shaded light. Large, too. So large that the spot where Helga sat was a small oasis in a desert of darkness. And eerily quiet. But that was what she liked after her taxing day’s work, after the hard classes, in which she gave willingly and unsparingly of herself with no apparent return. She loved this tranquillity, this quiet, following the fret and strain of the long hours spent among fellow members of a carelessly unkind and gossiping faculty, following the strenuous rigidity of conduct required in this huge educ
ational community of which she was an insignificant part. This was her rest, this intentional isolation for a short while in the evening, this little time in her own attractive room with her own books. To the rapping of other teachers, bearing fresh scandals, or seeking information, or other more concrete favors, or merely talk, at that hour Helga Crane never opened her door.

  An observer would have thought her well fitted to that framing of light and shade. A slight girl of twenty-two years, with narrow, sloping shoulders and delicate, but well-turned, arms and legs, she had, none the less, an air of radiant, careless health. In vivid green and gold negligee and glistening brocaded mules, deep sunk in the big high-backed chair, against whose dark tapestry her sharply cut face, with skin like yellow satin, was distinctly outlined, she was—to use a hackneyed word—attractive. Black, very broad brows over soft, yet penetrating, dark eyes, and a pretty mouth, whose sensitive and sensuous lips had a slight questioning petulance and a tiny dissatisfied droop, were the features on which the observer’s attention would fasten; though her nose was good, her ears delicately chiseled, and her curly blue-black hair plentiful and always straying in a little wayward, delightful way. Just then it was tumbled, falling unrestrained about her face and on to her shoulders.

  Helga Crane tried not to think of her work and the school as she sat there. Ever since her arrival in Naxos she had striven to keep these ends of the days from the intrusion of irritating thoughts and worries. Usually she was successful. But not this evening. Of the books which she had taken from their places she had decided on Marmaduke Pickthall’s Saïd the Fisherman. She wanted forgetfulness, complete mental relaxation, rest from thought of any kind. For the day had been more than usually crowded with distasteful encounters and stupid perversities. The sultry hot Southern spring had left her strangely tired, and a little unnerved. And annoying beyond all other happenings had been that affair of the noon period, now again thrusting itself on her already irritated mind.

  She had counted on a few spare minutes in which to indulge in the sweet pleasure of a bath and a fresh, cool change of clothing. And instead her luncheon time had been shortened, as had that of everyone else, and immediately after the hurried gulping down of a heavy hot meal the hundreds of students and teachers had been herded into the sun-baked chapel to listen to the banal, the patronizing, and even the insulting remarks of one of the renowned white preachers of the state.

  Helga shuddered a little as she recalled some of the statements made by that holy white man of God to the black folk sitting so respectfully before him.

  This was, he had told them with obvious sectional pride, the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country, north or south; in fact, it was better even than a great many schools for white children. And he had dared any Northerner to come south and after looking upon this great institution to say that the Southerner mistreated the Negro. And he had said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would be no race problem, because 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. He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know when and where to stop. He hoped, he sincerely hoped, that they wouldn’t become avaricious and grasping, thinking only of adding to their earthly goods, for that would be a sin in the sight of Almighty God. And then he had spoken of contentment, embellishing his words with scriptural quotations and pointing out to them that it was their duty to be satisfied in the estate to which they had been called, hewers of wood and drawers of water. And then he had prayed.

  Sitting there in her room, long hours after, Helga again felt a surge of hot anger and seething resentment. And again it subsided in amazement at the memory of the considerable applause which had greeted the speaker just before he had asked his God’s blessing upon them.

  The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all. Strange, too, for this was the thing which she had ardently desired to share in, to be a part of this monument to one man’s genius and vision. She pinned a scrap of paper about the bulb under the lamp’s shade, for, having discarded her book in the certainty that in such a mood even Saïd and his audacious villainy could not charm her, she wanted an even more soothing darkness. She wished it were vacation, so that she might get away for a time.

  “No, forever!” she said aloud.

  The minutes gathered into hours, but still she sat motionless, a disdainful smile or an angry frown passing now and then across her face. Somewhere in the room a little clock ticked time away. Somewhere outside, a whippoorwill wailed. Evening died. A sweet smell of early Southern flowers rushed in on a newly-risen breeze which suddenly parted the thin silk curtains at the opened windows. A slender, frail glass vase fell from the sill with a tingling crash, but Helga Crane did not shift her position. And the night grew cooler, and older.

  At last she stirred, uncertainly, but with an overpowering desire for action of some sort. A second she hesitated, then rose abruptly and pressed the electric switch with determined firmness, flooding suddenly the shadowy room with a white glare of light. Next she made a quick nervous tour to the end of the long room, paused a moment before the old bow-legged secretary that held with almost articulate protest her school-teacher paraphernalia of drab books and papers. Frantically Helga Crane clutched at the lot and then flung them violently, scornfully toward the wastebasket. It received a part, allowing the rest to spill untidily over the floor. The girl smiled ironically, seeing in the mess a simile of her own earnest endeavor to inculcate knowledge into her indifferent classes.

  Yes, it was like that; a few of the ideas which she tried to put into the minds behind those baffling ebony, bronze, and gold faces reached their destination. The others were left scattered about. And, like the gay, indifferent wastebasket, it wasn’t their fault. No, it wasn’t the fault of those minds back of the diverse colored faces. It was, rather, the fault of the method, the general idea behind the system. Like her own hurried shot at the basket, the aim was bad, the material drab and badly prepared for its purpose.

  This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine. It was now a show place 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 cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern. Teachers as well as students were subjected to the paring process, for it tolerated no innovations, no individualisms. Ideas it rejected, and looked with open hostility on one and all who had the temerity to offer a suggestion or ever so mildly express a disapproval. Enthusiasm, spontaneity, if not actually suppressed, were at least openly regretted as unladylike or ungentlemanly qualities. The place was smug and fat with self-satisfaction.

  A peculiar characteristic trait, cold, slowly accumulated unreason in which all values were distorted or else ceased to exist, had with surprising ferociousness shaken the bulwarks of that self-restraint which was also, curiously, a part of her nature. And now that it had waned as quickly as it had risen, she smiled again, and this time the smile held a faint amusement, which wiped away the little hardness which had congealed her lovely face. Nevertheless she was soothed by the impetuous discharge of violence, and a sigh of relief came from her.

  She said aloud, quietly, dispassionately: “Well, I’m through with that,” and, shutting off the hard, bright blaze of the overhead lights, went back to her chair and settled down with an odd gesture of sudden soft collapse, like a person who had been for months fighting the devil and then unexpectedly had turned round and agreed to do his bidding.

  Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the keen joy and zest of those immature people who have dreamed dreams of doing good to the
ir fellow men. But gradually this zest was blotted out, giving place to a deep hatred for the trivial hypocrisies and careless cruelties which were, unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos policy of uplift. Yet she had continued to try not only to teach, but to befriend those happy singing children, whose charm and distinctiveness the school was so surely ready to destroy. Instinctively Helga was aware that their smiling submissiveness covered many poignant heartaches and perhaps much secret contempt for their instructors. But she was powerless. In Naxos between teacher and student, between condescending authority and smoldering resentment, the gulf was too great, and too few had tried to cross it. It couldn’t be spanned by one sympathetic teacher. It was useless to offer her atom of friendship, which under the existing conditions was neither wanted nor understood.

  Nor was the general atmosphere of Naxos, its air of self-rightness and intolerant dislike of difference, the best of mediums for a pretty, solitary girl with no family connections. Helga’s essentially likable and charming personality was smudged out. She had felt this for a long time. Now she faced with determination that other truth which she had refused to formulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was utterly unfitted for teaching, even for mere existence, in Naxos. She was a failure here. She had, she conceded now, been silly, obstinate, to persist for so long. A failure. Therefore, no need, no use, to stay longer. Suddenly she longed for immediate departure. How good, she thought, to go now, tonight!—and frowned to remember how impossible that would be. “The dignitaries,” she said, “are not in their offices, and there will be yards and yards of red tape to unwind, gigantic, impressive spools of it.”

  And there was James Vayle to be told, and much-needed money to be got. James, she decided, had better be told at once. She looked at the clock racing indifferently on. No, too late. It would have to be tomorrow.