Helga is initially enthusiastic about Harlem life, but becomes dissatisfied, partly because she feels excluded by the polarisation of black and white politics: she experiences complex feelings about what she and her friends consider inherent differences between races. Hayes-Rore enables Helga to move to Harlem and become a secretary there. Hayes-Rore, who is a prominent activist concerning the 'race problem'. Unemployed and in desperation, Helga is saved by a few days working as secretary to the black, wealthy but brash Mrs. In Chicago, Helga's white maternal uncle and former sponsor, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Helga's anger at the sermon incites her first attempt to escape oppression: she quits her job and moves home to Chicago. Washington-inspired sermon that reinforces racial segregation and warns black students that striving for social equality will lead them to become avaricious. A key development in the plot is her discontent at the social uplift philosophy espoused by a white preacher, a Booker T. While teaching in Naxos, Helga suffers from angst, repelled by the institution's tendency to whitewash her black colleagues. : 537 The principal is Dr Anderson, with whom Helga-as she later realises-falls in love. The novel begins with Helga teaching at a southern black school in Naxos (thought by critics to reflect Larsen's experiences of the Tuskegee Institute and Fisk University). The novel gives us a glimpse into the dichotomy of biracial identity and the divergence into two vastly different worlds as the protagonist travels through uniquely different cultural spaces ranging from Jazz Age Harlem to Copenhagen, Denmark. Her early years were spent with her Danish mother and White step-father who loathed her, and there began her torn relationship with her split identity. Helga is the daughter of a Danish mother, who died when she was an adolescent, and a West Indian father, who is absent. The protagonist is the well educated, mixed-race Helga Crane, who struggles to find her identity in a world of racialized crisis in the 1920s. Larsen called the emotional experiences of the novel 'the awful truth' in a letter to her friend Carl van Vechten. McLendon called this work the more 'obviously autobiographical' of Larsen's two novels. Larsen dedicated the novel to her husband.

Out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s, Quicksand is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. Quicksand is the first novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. ( March 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable.

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