Ahh, So You’re Not

Friday started at three in the morning with a conf call.  Happens that time, every week.  Asia was finishing up their workday.  Texting people, unraveling problems, suggesting ways around a misunderstanding that two people had suddenly kicked up.   And then one by one the people faded off into their Asia evening.  I’d need a nap later but for now I was up, the sun was up, and I lay down in single bed in this office room and continued my way through Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand.”

I was distracted, likely, when I read the section of it which they provided in that Harlem Renaissance Reader I’d went through not long ago.  Adroit writing, surely, thought provoking, atmospheric descriptions but like the title suggested, I felt that I was being dragged down into a slow read and a steady throb of discontent. 

I have a very different perspective on her achievement having now read the book straight through.  Certainly, Helga Crane is never satisfied.  Teaching in the south is dreadful and she leaves before the semester is up.  In Chicago, her uncle’s new wife treats her abysmally. Harlem is exciting and then it isn’t.  We travel to Copenhagen. It isn’t hard to consider how Denmark would be a welcome respite from the question of racial identity but there too, it proves inescapable.  No, she won’t marry the famous painter who cast her as a savage in his portrait.  And, so like the “Ex-colored Man” in James Wendell Johnson’s “Autobiography” or Claude McKay’s Jake Brown in “Home to Harlem” the siren call of Manhattan pulls Helga back to New York.  By this time, I wasn’t disappointed by Helga any longer.  I wished for her to surmount herself but came to understand that her dissatisfaction, was the message. 

The man she’d always love delights her and then misreads her and crushes her heart.  Helga’s anguish, achingly comprehensible, leads her out into the elements.  She comes out of the rain, and into a church service.  Slowly, plausibly, she descends into a tearful rapture.  I remember thinking, ‘ahh, so you’re not going to end this by allowing her to fall in love.  You’re going to save her soul.”  She finds religion, she marries the preacher, they move down south and live a God-fearing life during which she becomes an unwitting breeder.  New boys born, every year and remarkably, God isn’t the answer for Helga either.  She hates this life, she hates her husband, she’s no affection for her newborn and she is now sinking down and I understood the fullness of her tragedy and of course the title. 

Friday, 07/17/20