Negroland A Memoir Author:Margo Jefferson 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. — ... more »
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 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 illustrations.)« less
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