Negroland : a memoir / Margo Jefferson.

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Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

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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 the author'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--Jefferson brilliantly 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.

(With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

I'm a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.   I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures arise to challenge its primacy.   I call it Negroland because "Negro" dominated our history for so long; because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long; because they were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or, as we now say, how race was constructed. For nearly two hundred years we in Negroland have called ourselves all manner of things. Like      the colored aristocracy      the colored elite      the colored 400      the 400      the blue vein society      the big families, the old families, the old settlers, the pioneers      Negro society, black society      the Negro, the black, the African-American upper class or elite. I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public. (Even now I shy away from the word "failings.") Even the least of them would be turned against the race. Most white people made no room for the doctrine of "human, all too human": our imperfections were sub- or provisionally human.   For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.   Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we're prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.   I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite. But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?   A brief vita of the author.      Margo Jefferson:      Ancestors: (In chronological order): slaves and slaveholders in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; farmers, musi­cians, butlers, construction crew supervisors, teachers, beauticians and maids, seamstresses and dressmakers, engineers, policewomen, real estate businesswomen, lawyers, judges, doctors and social workers      Father's fraternity: Kappa Alpha Psi      Mother's (and sister's) sorority: Delta Sigma Theta      Parents' national clubs: the Boulé (father); the Northeast­erners (mother)     Sister's and my national clubs: Jack and Jill; the Co-Ettes   Local clubs, schools, and camps will be named as we go along. Skin color and hair will be described, evaluated too, along with other racialized physical traits. Questions inevita­bly will arise. Among them: How does one--how do you, how do I--parse class, race, family, and temperament? How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me? Here are some of this group's founding categories, the opposi­tions and distinctions they came to live by.      Northerner / Southerner      house slave / field hand      free black / slave black      free black / free mulatto      skilled worker / unskilled worker (free or slave)      owns property / owns none      reads and writes fluently / reads a little but does not write / reads and writes a little / neither reads nor writes      descends from African and Indian royalty / descends from African obscurities / descends from upper-class whites / descends from lower-class whites / descends from no whites at all   White Americans have always known how to develop aris­tocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the Mayflower and become founding fathers. German laborers emigrate to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings. Women of equally modest origins marry these men or their rivals or their betters and become social arbiters.   We did the same. "Colored society" was originally a mélange of      men and women who were given favorable treatment, money, property, and even freedom by well-born Cauca­sian owners, employers, and parents;      men and women who bought their freedom with hard cash and hard labor;      men, women, and children bought and freed by slavery-hating whites or Negro friends and relatives;      men and women descended from free Negroes, hence born free.   They learned their letters and their manners; they learned skilled trades (barber, caterer, baker, jeweler, machinist, tailor, dressmaker); they were the best-trained servants in the bet­ter white homes and hotels; they bought real estate; published newspapers; established schools and churches; formed clubs and mutual aid societies; took care to marry among themselves. Some arrived from Haiti alongside whites fleeing Toussaint L'Ouverture's black revolution: their ranks included free mulat­toes and slaves who, after some pretense of loyalty, found it easy to desert their former masters and go into the business of upward mobility. From New Orleans to New York, men and women of mixed blood insistently established their primacy.   I've fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. Excerpted from Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this emotional memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner Jefferson (writing, Columbia Univ.; On Michael Jackson) examines race, gender, and class through memories of growing up in a wealthy, elite family in Chicago. A member of Negroland, Jefferson's term for a small group of privileged African Americans, she explains the contradictory nature of her existence, relating tales of childhood and young adulthood that will be familiar to anyone who was once an adolescent girl trying to measure up. These reflections also reveal a painful duality that exists within Negroland, one that can lead to depression and, in some families, exile. Coming of age in the civil rights era, during the shift into second-wave feminism, Jefferson parallels her remembrances with current events of her lifetime; she was born in the 1960s. The author's heartfelt prose takes her audience on a journey through rejection and acceptance, exclusion and inclusion, self-doubt and perseverance in this page-turning, provocative narrative. Includes eight pages of black-and-white photographs. VERDICT Highly recommended for biography and memoir lovers, historians, and readers interested in psychology and social movements. [See Prepub Alert, 3/16/15.]-Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Jefferson (On Michael Jackson), a former book and theater critic for the New York Times and Newsweek, writes about growing up in mid-20th-century Chicago as well as in "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty" in this eloquent and enlightening memoir. Jefferson describes how her peers thought of themselves as "the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians." Jefferson's father was a pediatrician at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital, and her mother was a social worker turned socialite. With her family's privilege came many perks: attendance at the private, progressive, mostly white University of Chicago Laboratory School; summer camps; drama performances; an impeccable wardrobe; and membership in national black civic organizations such as Jack and Jill of America and the Co-Ettes Club. Yet much was expected; for Jefferson's generation, she says, the motto was "Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment." In the late 1970s, though established in a successful journalism career, Jefferson contemplated suicide to escape the continued weight of these expectations. Black women, she writes, had been "denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity." Perceptive, specific, and powerful, Jefferson's work balances themes of race, class, entitlement, and privilege with her own social and cultural awakening. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Born into an upper-class black family in Chicago, Jefferson came of age in the 1960s at a time when just beneath the surface of the civil rights movement, blacks were struggling with class frictions that complicated the ideals of racial unity. Her accomplished and aspiring parents and their friends sometimes thought of themselves as the Third Race, neither black nor white. Her father was a doctor, and her mother a proud stay-at-home mom. They were the strivers and achievers who longed to be judged by their merits, resentful of the racial identification they could not avoid. Jefferson recalls family members who passed, glorious social gatherings with elite entertainers whose fame didn't shield them from racial slights, and the comfort so many took in the embrace of people of their own race and class. Her parents fought the good fight to be treated with respect and equality and looked for any signs of backwardness they might need to root out of their daughters, who were alternately fascinated and repelled by the very cultural signifiers their parents feared. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jefferson draws on cultural touchstones, from Ebony to James Baldwin to Ntozake Shange, as she traces her life during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when radical race consciousness and feminism questioned all of the old assumptions. This is a beautifully written memoir of growing up in the black elite with its distinctive challenges of race and class.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning theater and book critic, a memoir about being raised in upper-class black Chicago, where families worked tirelessly to distance themselves as much from lower-class black people as from white people. Born in 1947, Jefferson (On Michael Jackson, 2006) has lived through an era that has seen radical shifts in the way black people are viewed and treated in the United States. The civil rights movement, shifting viewpoints on affirmative action, and the election of the first black president, with all the promise and peril it held: the author has borne witness to changes that her parents could only have dreamed about. Jefferson was born in a small part of Chicago where a "black elite" lived, to a father who was the head of pediatrics at Provident, the country's oldest black hospital, and a socialite mother. The author describes a segment of the population intent on simultaneously distinguishing itself from both white people and lower-class black people and drawing from both groups to forge its own identity. She writes about being raised in a mindset that demanded the best from her and her family, while she also experienced resentment regarding the relative lack of recognition for the achievements they had earned. Jefferson tells a story of her parents seeing Sammy Davis Jr. on stage, early in his career, when he hadn't yet established himself enough to completely let his own unique style shine through. Her parents could see the change coming, thoughthe self-assuredness in his performanceand they saw that as emblematic of their own rise. 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.