Helga Crane, Quicksand

Helga Crane is a very complex character. She is a mulatto, born of a Danish mother and black father. An educated teacher, Helga has a restless spirit and is not satisfied with teaching in an all-black school in Naxos, GA. Due to her mixed racial heritage, she is drawn to the exotic and sensual side of life as a black in the Harlem renaissance, as well as to the formal, stuffy life of a white aristocrat, as she experienced during the period of time spent with her aunt in Denmark. Throughout her life she searches for her true self, but her happiness is fleeting and always melts away into a restless anger, hatred and depression until she finds a new possibility.

Helga is at times disgusted with the constant struggle for racial equality and sees the plight of blacks in America as oppressed and depressing. However...