![]() ![]() Two chapters later, Helga wearies of another activist friend, Anne Grey, who, she complains, Aside from these it was, Helga reflected, the same old thing. Hayes-Rore has seasoned hers with a peppery dash of Du Bois and a few vinegary statements of her own. Washington, and other doctors of the race’s ills. Ideas, phases, and even whole sentences and paragraphs, were lifted bodily from previous orations and published works of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Helga had heard other lecturers say the same things in Devon and again in Naxos. These speeches proved to be merely patchworks of others’ speeches and opinions. ![]() Hayes-Rore as a prominent “race” woman and an authority on the problem was to deliver before several meetings of the annual convention of the Negro Women’s League of Clubs, conveying the next week in New York. On the train that carried them to New York, Helga had made short work of correcting and condensing the speeches, which Mrs. ![]() ![]() Helga, working as secretary and personal assistant to a prominent black activist, quickly loses interest in the topic: This rigorously ironic 1928 novel of the Harlem Renaissance (its author’s first) has itself, in its afterlife, succumbed to an irony: contemporary readers tend to encounter it in the context of political discourses on American race relations, yet its heroine, Helga Crane, early on in the book decides that she is bored and even disgusted by all such discourses. ![]()
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