But that this would rarely if ever be acknowledged by white people” To act in any way contrary to these teachings, she writes, “could put you, your parents and people at risk.”

She is to distinguish herself “through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners” and to serve as a example for other non-Negroland Negros who “showed off the wrong things: their loud voices, their brash and garish ways, their gift for popular music and dance, for sports rather than the humanities and sciences.” She is to live with the crushing understanding that citizens of Negroland “were better than the whites who looked down on us-that we were better than most whites, period. Jefferson is taught to be impeccable in every art form, be it social niceties, intellectual achievement, or the cutthroat blonde rigors of the cheerleading squad. Her family moves from one privileged-yet-segregated enclave of Chicago black elite to the next, their geography directed by her father's growing success as doctor, until they arrive in almost entirely white Hyde Park-Kenwood, where low-income Negros are discouraged from remaining and small numbers of upper-middle-class Negros are permitted as “a model of socially stable integration.” “I call it Negroland because I still find 'Negro' a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.” Growing up in the late 1940s and 50s, young Jefferson is surrounded by every sort of material comfort: sailboats and ballet lessons, private clubs, private schools, sleepaway camps, and vacations in the Caribbean. “Negroland is my name for small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” writes Margo Jefferson in the opening of her elegant, genre-shattering memoir. In the days leading up to the March 17 announcement of the 2015 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Leigh Newman on autobiography finalist Margo Jefferson's “Negroland” (Pantheon).

Negroland review