The Land of the What Now?
Larsen’s novel Quicksand details the odyssey of mixed-race, light-skinned Helga Crane and her attempt to find self-esteem and self-identity in a world in which she constantly battles against isolation and restlessness. Eventually this journey takes her to Denmark where she can confront her deepest feelings about America and confront the truth about its claim to be the land of the free. This confrontation comes home in an outburst of brave truths:
“Go back to America, where they hated Negroes! To America, where Negroes were not people. To America, where Negroes were allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happiness, of security. To America, where everything had been taken from those dark ones, liberty, respect, even the labor of their hands. To America, where, if one had Negro blood, one mustn’t expect money, education, or, sometimes, even work whereby one might earn bread.”
The Machine
Helga’s angry interior tirade toward the hypocrisy of America while in Denmark actually begins in earnest earlier when she takes a job teaching at a school in Alabama. The disillusionment begins with first kindling of understanding about how the American system is at all times and about all things assimilation into the corporate machine of white culture:
“This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine. It was now a showplace 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.”
Imagery as Ironic Foreshadowing
In truth, “Freedom” is a short story that is almost consistently one paragraph after another of persistently shifting imagery. There is no dialogue and no interaction between characters. It is an interior monologue that provides background information on a relationship the male protagonist had with an unnamed woman. The narrative movies inexorably toward a tragic twist with the ironic imagery foreshadowed early on coming into sharp focus only in retrospect after one knows how things end:
“He was happy. The world had turned to silver and gold, and life again became a magical adventure. Even the placards in the shops shone with the light of paradise upon them. One caught and held his eye. Travel…Yes, he would travel; lose himself in India, China, the South Seas…Radiance from the most battered vehicle and the meanest pedestrian. Gladness flooded him. He was free.”
What is Plagiarism, Really?
The big black mark still on Nella Larsen’s reputation is whether or not she intentionally plagiarized another author’s work when writing her short story “Sanctuary.” There is absolutely no question that plots are identical; what is left open is whether to believe Larsen’s story that it was a folk tale she’d heard all her life or not. To suggest that the stories are identical completely, however, is to miss completely the aesthetic individuality with which Larsen infuses her version that makes read it almost a completely different experience. That individuality is imagery in the form of deep, dense and often difficult to penetrate dialogue written in black American dialect:
“But you alius been triflin’. Cain’t do nuffin’ propah. An’ Ah’m a-tellin’ you ef dey warn’t white folks an’ you a po’ niggah, Ah shuah wouldn’t be lettin’ you mess up mah feather baid dis ebenin’, ’cose Ah jes’ plain don’ want you hyah. Ah done kep’ mahse’f outen trubble all mah life. So’s Obadiah.”
