Quicksand & Passing – Nella Larsen (1928/9)

A few years ago, I read Passing by Nella Larsen with my book group, I was blown away by it. However, despite having this convenient edition containing both Larsen’s famous novellas I never managed to get around to Quicksand. When I read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett recently, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Passing – and I decided I would re-read it, but not before I read Quicksand as well.

Nella Larsen did not produce a large body of work which is a shame, these two short novels and a few short stories appear to be it – yet what she has produced is extraordinary in its discussion of race in the United States in the early part of the Twentieth century. The heroines in these two slight novels are complex, their desires and frustrations palpable.

Quicksand was the first to be published – it appears to be particularly autobiographical. Helga Crane is an attractive, genteel young woman, the daughter of a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father. When her mother died, Helga at fifteen years old was thrust upon the mercies of her mother’s relatives, who objected to having the child of a black man reliant upon them. Only one uncle; Peter was ever kind to her.

As the novel opens Helga is teaching in a black boarding school in the South and is engaged to be married. Yet, Helga is far from satisfied, strongly disagreeing with the philosophy of the school where she works, Helga decides to leave, and head back North to Chicago where she grew up and where her mother’s family still live.

“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.”

This is just the first of several journeys Helga will embark upon in a bid to find the life she is comfortable with. Helga has never felt a part of the black communities that she has encountered in her life, but neither is she entirely comfortable in white communities. Over time, Helga begins to think the way that race is viewed in America is the problem.

Rejected by her Uncle Peter’s new, bigoted wife – Helga takes the opportunity to travel to New York where she later gets a job as a secretary to a black woman who is enormously concerned with the ‘race problem.’ Helga’s restlessness takes her to Copenhagen, and the home of her maternal aunt, in Denmark, she discovers she is treated entirely differently, a woman of colour she is desirable suddenly and exotic. Eventually, Helga begins to miss the black people she once thought she was anxious to go away from, and she returns to America. The decisions she makes thereafter are questionable – and the novel’s ending is far from optimistic.

Passing was published just a year after Quicksand, for me it is just on another level – absolutely brilliant, unforgettable, and quite heart-breaking. It portrays what the realities were for middle-class African-Americans in the United states of the 1920s. Irene Redfield and Clare Bellew are two light-skinned black women who grew up together and were childhood friends.

“The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.”

They meet by chance in a restaurant – where neither of them would be allowed to go, were the management aware of their heritage. While Irene is ‘passing’ for mere convenience – to have tea somewhere elegant and refined near to where she was shopping – Clare spends her whole life passing as a white woman. Married to John Bellew – a bigoted white businessman, she also has a daughter – neither of whom know of her heritage.  Irene is married to a black doctor – with whom she has two sons.

“She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”

Having met again, the lives of the two women become entwined again – rather against Irene’s better judgement. Irene realises that Clare is living a dangerous existence – and deep down wants no part of it. When she is brought face to face with Clare’s husband and his sneering racism and hears the vile nickname he has for his wife – Irene vows to have nothing more to do with her childhood friend. So, when Clare turns up at Irene’s door and invites herself to a charity event Irene has been arranging – we sense that this will not end well.

Two slight novels with big themes, Quicksand and Passing are still enormously relevant today. I found these two novels made for fascinating companions to some of the modern novels which explore similar themes – notably of course The Vanishing Half.