Sanctuary

Sanctuary is a story written by Nella Larsen and first published in 1930, in The Forum magazine.

It distills a tense night in the Jim Crow South into a stark meditation on protection, guilt, and community.

The plot turns on a desperate plea for refuge: a frightened young man, pursued after a shooting, arrives at a rural mother’s cabin and begs to be hidden. Her decision hinges not on names but on the brutal calculus of the era—whether the victim was white or Black—underscoring racial solidarity as a survival strategy under segregation.

When officers stop by with news that the dead man is her own son, the story tightens into a harrowing moral dilemma. She still refuses to betray the fugitive to a system she knows offers no justice for people like them, sending him away with a chilling reminder of the protection his skin affords amid white violence. The twist reframes every earlier choice and leaves an aftertaste of ethics forged under oppression.

On publication, the piece provoked a controversy over alleged plagiarism and adaptation because of its resemblance to Sheila Kaye-Smith’s “Mrs. Adis.” Later scholars have read Larsen’s version as a deliberate reworking that centers Black experience and exposes the racial dynamics the earlier tale could not.

"On the Southern coast, between Merton and Shawboro, there is a strip of desolation some half a mile wide and nearly ten miles long between the sea and old fields of ruined plantations. Skirting the edge of this narrow jungle is a partly grown-over road which still shows traces of furrows made by the wheels of wagons that have long since rotted away or been cut into firewood. This road is little used, now that the state has built its new highway a bit to the west and wagons are less numerous than automobiles."