Eventually, she lands a short-term gig helping a woman named Mrs. However, she soon realizes it’s much harder to find work than she imagined, especially as she has no reference, and most of the jobs for women of color are in domestic labor. Nilssen, answers the door and turns Helga away, telling her never to come back again. Unfortunately, Uncle Peter’s racist new wife, Mrs. When Helga was 15, her mother died, but Uncle Peter sent Helga to a school for black girls, where she finally started to fit in. After Helga’s father left her mother, Helga had to live with her mother’s second husband who hated Helga for being half-black. When Helga gets to Chicago, she decides to visit her kind Uncle Peter. For some reason, she can’t get him out of her mind. Helga takes a train to Chicago, and frets about the way she talked to Dr. Helga storms out of the room, never to return again. Helga is moved by his speech and almost changes her mind, until he calls her a “lady.” Suddenly, she bursts out that she’s no lady: her black father left her white immigrant mother. Anderson implores her to stay, passionately explaining how they can work together to fix things. Helga explains that she can’t stand Naxos.
She is taken aback by his piercing gray eyes and kind demeanor, but keeps her resolve. The next morning, Helga visits the new principal, Dr.
Even though it would be prudent to wait out the school year, she feels she must leave Naxos (and her fiancé, James Vayle), immediately. Helga feels frustrated, and decides she needs to quit her job. Helga finds the system at Naxos highly problematic because she detects an undercurrent of racism in the way the school is run, even down to the way black staff are required to wear muted colors because the dean of women thinks “bright colors are vulgar” on dark skin. His sermon irritated Helga, because he said the black people at Naxos knew how to “stay in their places” and that the race problem would disappear if all black people acted like that. She didn’t get a lunch break earlier in the day because everyone was required to attend a sermon by a white preacher. Helga is 23 years old and is a beautiful mixed-race woman with golden skin and a slight frame. Helga Crane, the story’s protagonist, sits in her room at Naxos-a school for young black girls in the South-where she teaches.
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