Quicksand

Read this selection from the novel:

Fragments of a speech made by the dean of women floated through her thoughts—‘Bright colors are vulgar’—‘Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people’—‘Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow, or green or red.’—The dean was a woman from one of the ‘first families’—a great ‘race’ woman; she, Helga Crane, a despised mulatto; but something intuitive, some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness told her that bright colors were fitting and that dark-complexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress, which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she wondered, didn’t someone write A Plea for Color? These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destruction.