Helga Crane is the aloof and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish white mother and a West Indian black father. Her mother died when she was fifteen years old, leaving her to be under the care of her relatives. Rejected by her European-American relatives and not raised with her West Indian father, Crane feels adrift and "without people." Over the course of the novel, she travels throughout the United States and Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home. In her travels she encounters many of the communities which Larsen knew. For example, Crane teaches at Naxos, a black Southern boarding school (based on Tuskegee Institute), where she becomes dissatisfied with its philosophy of sober racial uplift and accommodation to the mainstream white world. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher, who advocates for Booker T. Washington-style racial segregation and warns black students that striving for social equality will lead them to become avaricious. Crane quits teaching and moves to Chicago. Her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Crane moves to Harlem, New York, where she becomes the secretary to a refined, but often hypocritical, black middle-class woman who is obsessed with the "race problem." Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic. Missing black people, she returns to New York City. Close to a mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and has a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converted her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races. The novel develops Crane's search for a marriage partner. As it opens, she has become engaged to marry a prominent Southern black man, whom she does not really love, but through whom she can become a part of the black elite. In Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist, for whom she is the embodiment of an exoticized African ideal. By the final chapters, Crane has married a black Southern preacher whom she finds physically revolting. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic. Disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, Crane fantasizes about leaving her husband, but never does.