Negroland by Margo Jefferson review: growing up in Chicago’s ‘Negro’ elite

Negroland: A Memoir

Author: Margo Jefferson

ISBN-13: 9781783783021

Publisher: Granta

Guideline Price: €12.99

‘Negroland” is Margo Jefferson’s coinage to denote the milieu of affluent black Chicagoans in the 1950s and 1960s. These successful strivers and members of the liberal professions were a socioeconomic anomaly.

"Inside the race, we were self-designated aristocrats," Jefferson writes. "To Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers." As her mother told her, "We're considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans. But most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes." A personal memoir with profound political resonance, Negroland is an illuminating exploration of the racial politics of culture and class.

Jefferson, a Pulitzer-winning theatre critic for the New York Times before becoming a professor of writing, relates her youthful self-doubt with candour and sincerity. Cultivated and ambitious, she struggled to reconcile her grounding in respectable bourgeois values with an emerging political consciousness in an era of intense racial strife.

The teenage Margo was hopeless when it came to acting cool, too earnest to strike aloof poses, too well spoken to pull off street slang. When she smoked she inhaled fully. As a consequence she was socially handicapped “among Negroes who found me . . . socially inept due to an excess of white-derived manners and interests.”

Jefferson is hard on her teenage self, bemoaning “that ingratiating little integrationist in high school” who could not, try as she might, efface the traces of her privilege: “your background . . . weasels its way in. Purge it from your intellectual pronouncements; it pops up in how you expressed them. The peremptory tone that you tell yourself is rigorous.”

Recalling a time she incurred a parental scalding for imitating the coarse mannerisms of some less well- heeled friends, Jefferson reflects on the near impossibility of protecting children from an ever-present “chasm of ignorance and inferiority”, always waiting to swallow them up. “How,” she asks, “were those of us being naturalized into white culture to be protected without the shield of cultural segregation?”

Culture as power

Culture, in the default sense of what is normative and what is good, is by and large implicitly bound up in power. It is constituted by, and in turn perpetuates, the plethora of mores, assumptions and prejudices that help sustain the status quo. It is thus both a panacea – a means to social advancement, an antidote to racial marginalisation – and a suffocating constraint. How, then, is one to be both dissident and good?

Arts criticism was a natural outlet for such an astute observer of these contradictions. Jefferson recalls her early engagement with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and her exasperation with the character Nigger Jim, whose portrayal pandered to negative black stereotypes despite Mark Twain's not being a racist. A relatable black character would have displeased white readers: "Our We is too much like Theirs. Which threatens them, bores them, or both."

Here, and in Jefferson's fierce objection to James Baldwin's dismissal (on grounds of sentimentalism) of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, we see the development of a sharp, independent critical sensibility in its formative phase.

One of the most remarkable passages in Negroland is a segment on mental health. The 20th century's psychological turn empowered many women to explore emotional frailty as a way of articulating their social and political struggles. This option was largely denied to black women, whose "history of duty, obligation and discipline" all but precluded them from "flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity".

It is for this reason that Jefferson cherishes Nella Larsen's 1920s novels of ill-starred Jazz Age heroines and treasures the moment in 1975 when the playwright Nzotake Shange dedicated her breakthrough play – in its very title, no less – to colored girls who have considered suicide.

Here the personal was truly the political: equality meant giving voice to your interior life, your subjectivity. Duly inspired, Jefferson repeatedly practised putting her head in the oven, taking particular care to maintain an elegant posture. She didn’t want to be found in an ugly sprawl.

Towards the end of Negroland she asks, "How do you adapt your singular, wilful self to so much history and myth?" It is the central question at the heart of this compelling book. The vast impersonal forces that shape our lives are never quite as immutable as they seem. Culture equips us to talk back to them, and to take control of our destinies.

Houman Barekat is a literary critic