Negroland

ISBN: 0307378454

Author: Jefferson, Margo

Condition: New

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for AutobiographyA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNew York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2015New York Times: Dwight Garners Best Books of 2015Washington Post: 10 Best Books of 2015Los Angeles Times: 31 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015Marie Claire: Best Books of 2015Vanity Fair: Best Book Gifts of 2015TIME Best Books of 2015At 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 authors 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 nations 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.)