"No family. That was the crux of the whole matter. For Helga, it accounted for everything, her failure here in Naxos, her former loneliness in Nashville. It even accounted for her engagement to James."" Helga had clearly recognised that it was not able to be a respected member of society without having the proper family connections. "Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society."" Without "ancestry and connections- it was only possible to be "tolerated-, but not to integrate into the black middle-class. Larsen clearly criticises the assimilation of white standards for judging African-Americans. In being mainly concerned with social and racial uplift, did they oppress their identity as being a black person with a black heritage that included a passion for music and colourful clothing. The idea of conforming to the appropriate attitudes of Whites is especially apparent with the dean of women, who enforces the notion that "black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people [that] dark-complected people shouldn't wear yellow, or green or red.""(51) African women living around the world dress in the most colourful fabrics, just as Helga's loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness told her- to do. (51) Larsen said everything with letting the narrator announce that "these people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of rice pride, and yet surpressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, love of joy, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destruction."" ( ) Interesting is here that Helga seems so accepting and open about her black heritage, yet she is not able to clearly accentuate pride for her own race or even for her own blackness throughout her life. She thinks of herself as a "despised mulatto-, having a black father and a white mother ruined all her prospects for leading a normal life as she envisions it.