Negroland : a memoir
/ Margo Jefferson.
- New York : Pantheon Books , 2015
- 248 p. ; 23 cm
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned to distance itself from whites and the black generality, while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty." Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.
English.
9780307378453
Jefferson, Margo (1947) ---Childhood and youth Jefferson family
African American women----Biography African Americans---Race identity Elite (Social sciences)---United States African American girls---Social conditions---Illinois---Chicago Region---20th century African americans---Social life and customs
Chicago, IL---Race relations---History---20th century----Andecdotes Chicago, IL---Social life and customs---20th century----Anecdotes Chicago Region, IL ----Biography