“Helga Crane turned away from the window, a shadow dimming the pale amber loveliness of her face.”
Colors—and all the myriad hues, shades and tints which define them—are found everywhere throughout this book. The narrative of the mulatto protagonist caught somewhere between the two colors dividing her bloodline is obsessed the idea. In just this one mundane description of the heroine, three references are found: the blackness of shadows, the yellow of amber and the implicit whiteness of “pale.”
Gray Chicago seethed, surged, and scurried about her.
That town of big shoulders—the Windy City—is for Helga Crane nothing but a hazy shade of gray disappointment. Everywhere she turns, the color—some insist it is merely a shade—gray confronts her. Chicago is a town on the grow for many, but not for Helga. For Miss Crane, the city that welcome here as Gray Chicago is the same Gray Chicago which she leaves behind.
With her had gone the fattish yellow man who had sat beside her. He had introduced himself as the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green in proffering his escort for which Helga had been grateful because she had still felt a little dizzy and much exhausted.
Rev. Green is a yellow man. Two colors within the space of less than two dozen words. Fat Reverend Green will prove to be something less than his name implies and her marriage to him late in the novel will cause her to regret very much being dizzy enough to actually become grateful he had sat her beside her that night.
“I think there’s less of these evils here than in most places, but because we’re trying to do such a big thing, to aim so high, the ugly things show more, they irk some of us more. Service is like clean white linen, even the tiniest speck shows.”
Anderson is Principal of the school in Alabama for black children where Helga briefly has a job teaching in the beginning of the novel. Feeling out of place, Helga announces her intention to leave the school and Anderson tries to talk her out of it. The real conflict here, however, is not professional, but personal as Helga’s love for Anderson and Anderson inability to act upon his requited passion and subsequent marriage to a rival of Helga’s becomes the true stimulus for eventual ill-fated encounter the yellow Reverend Green.
Turning from the window, her gaze wandered contemptuously over the dull at- tire of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly navy blue, black, brown, unrelieved, save for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks. 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.”
This is the point at which Helga begins making associations between color and fashion which will eventually evolve into an association between fashion and personality. Eventually, she will come to associate the color black with flight and flight with rebellion and rebellion with style and style with an awakening of awareness of her own sexuality and that awakening of her sexuality will eventually—in a non-linear sort of way—lead her directly to the mistake of marrying Rev. Green.
