Quicksand (1928) is the first novel to give a voice to the sexual desires of a black woman. Helga Crane, the book?s protagonist, is trapped in the conflict between an active and a passive sexual behaviour, between sexual fufilment and middle-class respectability. Conflicts of race and sex even a religious conversion cannot resolve. Passing, written a year later, is overtly about black people who ?pass? for white, but in a veiled way it also is the desire of one woman for another - a new and dar ...