Negroland

National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Autobiography, 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 19th 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 moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.