In Quicksand we are introduced to our protagonist Helga Crane, 23 years old biracial teacher that works in a Negro school in Naxos, Georgia. Helga is having a hard time in accepting her own background. Having a white mother and a black father has brought lots of frustration in her life because being a mulatto; she doesn’t feel like she can identify herself as either white or black. At some point Helga was pleased to be part of Naxos educational environment until she realized that it was an unpleasant racial place. After hearing a speech made by one of the professors in her school talking down to the black race disappointed her. “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 lack 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”(page 9). At this point she knows that students won’t be able to be their own individual but what the school is making them to be. After thinking about it for hours in her room she decided that it was time to leave Naxos. “And again it subsided in amazement at the memory of the consider-able applause which had greeted the speaker just before he had asked his God’s blessing upon them. The South. Naxos.Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all”(page 6-7) Helga didn’t want to be a part of this type of environment where the culture of these students was trying to be changed. Helga was already having a hard time in accepting who she was and staying in this place only will make it worst. This is the moment where I believe the Helga character started to develop because it was the beginning of her journey. The journey where she will be in search of finding self- happiness, her own identity and to feel comfortable in her own skin.
