Beyond Passing by Nella Larsen

Author:Nella Larsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CSRC Storytelling
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Well into Helga’s second year in Denmark came an indefinite discontent. Not clear, but vague, like a storm gathering far on the horizon. It was long before she would admit that she was less happy than she had been during her first year in Copenhagen, but she knew that it was so. And this subconscious knowledge added to her growing restlessness and little mental insecurity. She desired ardently to combat this wearing down of her satisfaction with her life, with herself. But she didn’t know how.

Frankly the question came to this: what was the matter with her? Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn’t she be happy, content, somewhere? Other people managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn’t she know how? Was she incapable of it?

And then on a warm spring day came Anne’s letter telling of her coming marriage to Anderson, who retained still his shadowy place in Helga Crane’s memory. It added, somehow, to her discontent, and to her growing dissatisfaction with her peacock’s life. This, too, annoyed her.

What, she asked herself, was there about that man which had the power always to upset her? She began to think back to her first encounter with him. Perhaps if she hadn’t come away—She laughed. Derisively. “Yes, if I hadn’t come away, I’d be stuck in Harlem. Working every day of my life. Chattering about the race problem.”

Anne, it seemed, wanted her to come back for the wedding. This, Helga had no intention of doing. True, she had liked and admired Anne better than anyone she had ever known, but even for her she wouldn’t cross the ocean.

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. Perhaps she was wrong to bother about it now that she was so far away. Helga couldn’t, however, help it. Never could she recall the shames and often the absolute horrors of the black man’s existence in America without the quickening of her heart’s beating and a sensation of disturbing nausea. It was too awful. The sense of dread of it was almost a tangible thing in her throat.

And certainly she wouldn’t go back for any such idiotic reason as Anne’s getting married to that offensive Robert Anderson. Anne was really too amusing. Just why, she wondered, and how had it come about that he was being married to Anne? And why did Anne, who had so much more than so many others—more than enough—want Anderson too? Why couldn’t she—“I think,” she told herself, “I’d better stop. It’s none of my business.

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