Helga Crane was one interesting character. She was stuck in a rut created all on her own with a bit of help from society I guess. She was a mulatto that DIDN’T necessarily look like one. She had brown skin, yet she tortured herself mentally on her belonging to any certain group or area. She felt as if she were above the blacks of America, from Georgia, to Chicago, and New York, the places she had traveled. Helga worked at Naxos one of the best schools for blacks, yet because she disagreed with their ideas she left. I would have left as well because the fact that they were drilling in those children’s heads that second best was just fine. After her departure from Naxos in Georgia, Helga moved to Chicago in order to meet up with her dear and white uncle Peter. Much to her chagrin, Uncle Peter had gotten married and his new wife shooed Helga away and told her to never return. Heartbroken and embarrassed, Helga took heed to what the wife said. She went searching for a job, yet she felt she was too good for some so excluded those options. She was blessed enough for one of the women whom she had interviewed with earlier, responded and offered her a job with another woman. Immediately Helga jumped for it. Her new boss Mrs. Hayes-Rore, was a listening boss and wanted to help Helga out. She ended up setting her up with her husbands’, sisters’, son’s wife to stay with and got her a job at a black insurance company. For the most part, Helga like it here in New York, but she got fed up with the monotonous days and left after receiving a note from her uncle. Because he wanted to keep his marriage afloat he had to agree with his wife and ask her not to return, but the money he was going to give her in his will, he thought she would be better off with it now. This gave her the motive and the way to get to her Aunt’s home in Copenhagen who had always wanted and loved her. Helga left for Denmark and was ogled at so much it was creeping her out. She was a new and impressive thing and yet she felt she belonged. She had spent so much time there that she was sick of how she was treated, like an exotic object. Her hand in marriage was requested and she turned him down. He was an artist named Axel and she didn’t love him that way. Her family whom she was elated to live with were trying to get her married but she said she wasn’t ready and wasn’t in love with anyone around. She then left Denmark when she received a letter from her friend, Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s niece, Anne. She was getting married to a man whom Helga had a crush home so she went back to the states promising to return. What ended up happening was she turned him down in the end as he wanted to have an affair with her. Due to her feeling she ruined it with him, she was losing her mind from it becoming clouded because she was heartbroken. She ran and ran in the poring rain until she ran into a revival and they thought she was some jezebel from the streets.
After all of the hoopla there, something mentally happened to her because she married a man she met there no too long after meeting him. His name was Rev. Pleasant Green. She ended up living in poor rural Alabama where she was a wife and mother of 3. It was at this point she had been there for a long time, yet her husband was publically flaunting his received flirtations from women, and he was getting more unattractive as he was lazy, and nasty. She wanted to flee after falling ill during the time of her fourth child and after she was alright she was ready to run, but much to her dismay, she was pregnant again, and was forced to remain in her circumstances.
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