Quicksand: A Harlem Renaissance Novel of Race, Identity, and Restless Desire

Helga Crane is a mixed-race teacher who struggles to find her identity in a world of racial crisis in the 1920s America. She is the daughter of a Danish mother, who died when she was an adolescent, and a West Indian father, who is absent. While teaching in Naxos, Helga suffers from social angst as she is discontented with the social uplift philosophy delivered by a white preacher. She moves to Harlem where she becomes the secretary to a refined, but often hypocritical, black middle-class wo...