Jungle music

Helga Crane has gone to a Harlem nightclub with friends. There’s a band, and a floorshow.

Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928).

Here’s an unmistakable suggestion of the “jungle music” of the early Duke Ellington. (One of the many pseudonyms under which the Ellington band recorded in the 1920s and ’30s: The Jungle Band.) But the scene here can’t be the Cotton Club: the people in Helga’s crowd are black, and the Cotton Club was limited to white patrons (with rare exceptions for celebrities of color). Helga is the child of a Danish mother and Black American father: the ambivalence that marks her brief time in “the jungle” markes every episode of her life. As the novel will later ask, “Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?”

I recommend Quicksand with great enthusiasm. It's not as artful or modern as Passing in its approach to narrative, but it’s a compelling novel that spirals down to a stark, abrupt end.

Also from Quicksand
“Ten hours to Chicago”