Helga Crane is well suited to evaluate the elements of both black and white cultures. As a biracial woman, she possesses insights into both societies. Seeking to establish her racial identity, Helga moves back and forth in both societies, discovering each's values and exposing each's prejudices. Helga’s internal struggle is as difficult as her external struggle to fit in because for most of the novel, she is confused by the racial hypocrisies she encounters and is incapable of fully committing to either culture.

The hypocrisy begins with Helga’s family. Helga’s black father deserts her white Danish mother, who is then forced to remarry someone of her own race in order to survive. Helga grows up the only black child in a white family. The memories of her stepfamily’s “malicious hate” still haunt her. Her white uncle sends her to a “Negro school,” but behind her back he expresses fears that she will not amount to anything because of her Negro blood. At the Negro school, Helga learns that while her darkness is not “loathsome,” it is not dark enough for the other students to embrace her. Neither blacks nor whites welcome the “unloved little Negro girl.”

Helga hopes to help her race while finding her black soul at Naxos school, but she finds Naxos to be nothing but “a showplace in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the black man’s inefficiency.” The “Naxos Negroes” complacently accept the white man’s estimation of them as Negroes who “know their place” while they are supposedly being educated so that they can transcend that place. Alone in her room, Helga decides she cannot tolerate such hypocrisy and resolves to seek refuge in Chicago where her white uncle still lives. Helga flees Naxos on a “Jim Crow” train, seated with “others of her race.” When a white man spits into the drinking fountain while walking through the “colored section,” Helga immediately notices a “stinging thirst” symbolic of her internal “thirst” to escape. She convinces a white conductor to sell her a berth apart from “the endless others” where she can rest in self-imposed exile on the way to Chicago.

In Chicago, Helga is again confronted by white and black racism. Her emotions are assaulted by endless racial slights. Uncle Peter’s new wife cannot imagine herself as the aunt of a Negro girl and sends Helga away. Wandering the streets confused, Helga is mistaken for a prostitute. The only positions available to people of color are as domestic servants, and Helga cannot sew or cook. She knows and loves books, but her race disqualifies her from working at the public library despite her education. Helga then meets a well-to-do black woman, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, who hires Helga to help with a speech on racial equality on the way to New York. Mrs. Hayes-Rore offers to introduce Helga to influential black people in Harlem but then warns her not to tell anyone that she is part white because “Colored people won’t understand it.”

In Harlem, Helga sets aside her whiteness, assuring herself that she has finally found her place among the bourgeois blacks who “have the same ideas as she does.” The racial hypocrisy she has been trying to escape soon surrounds her again in Harlem, however. Helga lives with the beautiful widow Anne Grey who is prominent in the “Negro Uplift Movement” but whose lifestyle imitates whites. Anne is an outspoken critic of white people, yet dislikes all things Negro, “...the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race.” Anne preaches racial equality, yet she is appalled by the...