Negroland: A Memoir

Review ''Jefferson is a national treasure, and her memoir should be required reading across the country.'' --Vanity Fair ''A candid observer, Jefferson articulates the complicated and calculated performance of upper-class black life.'' --New York magazine ''Jefferson's beautiful, unsettling account . . . may be a story about the past, but her observations on racial tension and prejudice in America ring true today as well. This is not just a book about one woman's history; it's a biography of the United States and the everyday struggle for equality.'' --Refinery29.com ''Treads briskly and fearlessly across the treacherous terrain of race, class, gender, and entitlement . . . Negroland is not about raw racism or caricatured villains. It is about subtleties and nuances, presumptions, and slights that chip away at one's humanity and take a mental toll. It is the story of Jefferson's evolution, too...Enlightening.'' --Washington Post ''Part memoir, part confession, part cultural critique, and part something that might be called prayer, Negroland is razor sharp, self-lacerating, and singular.'' --More magazine ''Jefferson's descriptions of how she 'craved' the right to despair are some of the most haunting parts of the book.'' --Time ''Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more.'' --Los Angeles Times ''Highly recommended for biography and memoir lovers, historians, and readers interested in psychology and social movements.'' --Library Journal ''Powerful . . . Deftly explores the tensions that come with being part of America's black elite.'' --O, The Oprah Magazine ''[A] powerful memoir and social history.'' --Chicago magazine ''Chronicles a lifetime as a member of Chicago's black elite . . . Once we become accustomed to delicious glimpses of Negroland's impeccable manners and outfits, the meticulously orchestrated social opportunities, and fastidiously maintained hairstyles, what we begin to notice is the cost and weight of this heavy collective burden . . . How can a book so slim take on such mammoth considerations and manage them with such efficacy? Perhaps because we gain entry via one girl and, later, the woman she becomes.'' --New York Times Book Review ''A beautifully written memoir.'' --Booklist (starred review) ''Jefferson swings the narrative back and forth through her life, exploring the tides of racism, opportunity, and dignity while also provocatively exploring the inherent contradictions for Jefferson and her family members in working so tirelessly to differentiate themselves.'' --Kirkus Reviews Product Description A deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture seen through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among Chicago's black elite. At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac -- here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born 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 postracial America -- Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and