In Quicksand, Helga Crane who is a 23 year old teacher in school in Naxos, Georgia, is born of a white mother and black father. Deeply lonely as a child, she has not been able to identify herself as either white or black. Helga then leaves Naxos and move to Chicago because she is tired of the racial politics of the school. She announces her resignation to the school’s principal, Dr. Anderson, to whom she becomes attracted to later in the reading. She breaks her engagement to a teacher named James Vayle, and leaves Naxos feeling relieved.
In Chicago, her mother’s brother Uncle Peter has a new wife, who rejects Helga due to her mixed race. Helga, alone and broke, finds work with an educated and wealthy woman named Mrs. Hayes-Rore, who asks Helga to edit her speeches on racial equality. After taking the job, Helga decides that she will relocate to New York and start a new life. Helga feels empowered by her decision and feels as if she had been “reborn”. She has a need to be in control of her own destiny and to feel like she is in control of the situations she finds herself in. Freedom was happiness for Helga and in Harlem she had a place to live, a stable job and good friends where she felt free.   But it didn’t last, this happiness of Helga Crane’s. We can see this change in the following passage.
“Little by little the signs of spring appeared, but strangely the enchantment of the season, so enthusiastically, so lavishly greeted by the gay dwellers of Harlem, filled her only with restlessness. Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to and hold for definite examination, become almost intolerable. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped. (390).”
By reading the above passage we can see how “old” Helga resurfaced and she was plaqued with feelings of doubt, insecurity and alienation. Where once felt connected to the heart of Harlem, Helga soon became disconnected. After receiving a note from her Uncle Peter urging her to reconnect with her Aunt Katrina who “always wanted” her in Denmark, Helga begins to look at Harlem differently. She says that “She didn’t, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She was different. She felt it. It wasn’t merely a matter of color. It was something broader, deeper, that made folk kin. (395). Then she felt free once again.
I also want to include that the epigram at the beginning of the novel by Langston Hughes seems like an appropriate introduction to Helga’s struggle to find her place in the world where she is questioning her own identity and her connections to the community around her.
