Negroland A Memoir

Margo Jefferson, Robin Miles

eAudio - 2015

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 inhabit...ants 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... more