Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Negroland A Memoir by Margo Jefferson Negroland by Margo Jefferson review – life in the black upper class. H ave you been to or, for that matter, even heard of “Negroland”? Here’s a clue. It’s not Harlem or Chicago’s South Side or any conurbation of black Americans. As Margo Jefferson illuminates in her captivating memoir, Negroland is not so much a geographic location as a state of mind; an exclusive club without discernible borders, to which few have ever belonged. Over the years, its members have been characterised by descriptions ranging from “the coloured 400” (families) to “the blue vein society”. If you have to ask how you gain entry to Negroland, you’ve already betrayed your lack of credentials. It’s a society composed of a “better class” of Negro, though such people’s judgment is not always sound. In one of Jefferson’s many startling passages she reveals that, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, the nation’s slave owners included free black members of the elite, such as Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana and his family, who collectively owned 215 slaves. Back then, polished and fragrant members of Negroland breathed in the rarefied air of privilege and held their noses at the passing by of any johnny-come-lately, just as Britain’s “old money” class did at the advent of the codfish aristocracy. “Negroland” is a very familiar world to Jefferson, a theatre critic for the New York Times, who grew up in the 1950s as the daughter of a not very rich but comfortable Chicago paediatrician and his fashionable socialite wife, who had “plucked, deep-toned eyebrows”. They are a family her mother describes as “upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans”. Riffing on that distinction, Jefferson neatly points to the gulf between black and white elites: the latter have an unassailable sense of entitlement; the former have to make do with a sense of privilege that is provisional – one that can be withheld or withdrawn. This realisation came crashing down on the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates when he was arrested for breaking into his own home in 2009. All of this might sound like a “first world problem”. But one of the challenges of Jefferson’s memoir is to remind us – if such a reminder is needed in the era of Black Lives Matter – just how far we are from the utopia of a post-racial America, or a post-racial UK for that matter. In so doing, it echoes William Faulkner’s assertion: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” A touchstone of cheeky glamour … Eartha Kitt. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features. Early on in the book, Jefferson sets out to deal with the word “Negro”, a term that today causes many to shudder (witness its recent deletion from the title of the 17th-century painting The Negro Page by nervous royal aides at Kensington Palace ahead of Barack Obama’s visit). Jefferson is refreshingly sanguine about the word, and uses it liberally throughout her book. She confides that she is attached to it “because ‘Negro’ dominated our culture for so long; because I lived with its meaning and intimation for so long”. As its title suggests, this is a bold and defiant work that enumerates the credits and deficits of black life; Jefferson’s reflections are leavened by a sharp wit and a literary rolling of the eyes when dissecting the nuances of prejudice. She has a particularly wry take on the sober obligations of being black, hating it when she wants to have fun but “race singles me out for special chores and duties”; and a fine eye for the limits of black privilege. In the world of classical ballet, for instance, black dancers are often considered not quite right, their bodies more suited to folklore dance which is “driven more by biology than by art”. The black body threatens always to bring shame and dread to its owner. The young Jefferson was desperate for signs that didn’t fully mark her down as a Negro, and is grateful that though her nostrils flare, “they do not flare in a way an unsympathetic observer could fixate on”. Jefferson conjures a rich, sepia-coloured past where people are fixated on colour; where a film star such as Dorothy Dandridge is pitied for her obsession with converting a white lover into a husband; and where Eartha Kitt, admired as a touchstone of “cheeky glamour” with an “impossibly suave accent”, by spurning the “soigné segregation of upper-crust parties”, earns the headline in the pre-eminent magazine for the black middle class, Ebony: “Why Negroes don’t like Eartha Kitt”. It’s a sign of Jefferson’s age (she focuses on her 1950s generation) and a mark of her light touch that, throughout, the word “Negro” is used graciously as if it were a butterfly emerging from the cultured mouth of Ralph Ellison or Martin Luther King. Her bitterness about the opportunities from which black people have been, and still are, disbarred by colour never spills over into the kind of dark thoughts of revenge articulated by her contemporary John Edgar Wideman. In his memoir, Fatheralong , Wideman describes seeing a benign elderly white professor precariously balanced at the top of a book ladder; he has a flash of hatred at the thought that his own intelligent father (the professor’s age) has been denied such a privileged life, and wishes the blameless professor would fall from the ladder and break his neck. Jefferson largely eschews fury but charts other shades of resentment – showing, for example, that working-class black Americans can better deal with white privilege than with black. She revisits the toxic “pigmentocracy” conflict in the 1920s between the black classes as epitomised by Marcus Garvey, the head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and his enemy, WEB Du Bois. Unashamedly elitist, Du Bois’s rival National Association for the Advancement of Colored People proposed that a “talented 10th” of African Americans (fair-skinned and tertiary- educated) would be the avant garde and would integrate into mainstream America, eventually pulling the rest of their forsaken brethren along with them. Du Bois called the working-class, self-educated Garvey a pretentious, overbearing buffoon; Garvey in turn lashed out at Du Bois as a self- loathing Negro, who wanted nothing more than to cosy up to white people. Beyoncé and her dancers perform a black-power-influenced routine at the Super Bowl half-time show in February. Photograph: Thearon W Henderson/Getty Images. Their rancorous dispute seems to have been a rehearsal for the class struggles ushered in by the 1960s black power movement – a time when an unhappy Jefferson recalls her wealthy peers sought to align themselves with darker, coarser-haired revolutionaries. Some wavy-haired elites even took to wearing Afro wigs. The moment marked a crisis of identity for Jefferson – in terms of race, class and gender. By the 1970s the clash between black power (perceived as a black male issue) and feminism (deemed to be the concern of white women) exposed what Jefferson saw as her privileged shortcomings. She was in despair, and confesses: “I began actively to cultivate a desire to kill myself.” Such thoughts were a libel on her upbringing. As Beyoncé has shown in Lemonade , black women’s default position was always one of strength and uncomplaining endurance; of converting lemons into lemonade. Self-pity forms no part of Jefferson’s writing palette. Her memoir doesn’t linger on grief: it’s mostly breezy and conversational, and every so often she breaks off to address the reader conspiratorially, like the protagonist in a film speaking directly to the camera. It serves the book well, for much of Negroland has the experimental and experiential quality of jazz – albeit the formal variety found in the concert hall rather than the freestyle, down and dirty jamming of the backstreet club. Charm is this book’s watchword. And by the end, it ably demonstrates that many black people have grown tired of the constant requirement to frame their lives through race, yearning for those unexpected, luxurious moments of relief that Jefferson’s mother expressed succinctly: “Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro.” Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson. Negroland, by Jefferson’s definition, is that demographic which is comprised of upper middle to upper class Blacks from the days of slavery through today. The author was raised in this community and it has been written about in various ways by several authors down through the generations from prior to the Civil War. ******* Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson 2015 / Read by Robin Miles 7h 59m Rating: B+/ memoir ******* This may be the most honest memoir I’ve ever read. What’s it like and how does it feel along with what all happened growing up as a privileged “Negro” in a white world. Negro is the word Jefferson uses rather lovingly. I think she understands the heritage of that word because it replaced the term “Black” back in the slave days. Respectable people would use the word “Negro” because it was much more respectable at the time. I say most honest memoir because it seems to me that, by what she reveals, Jefferson makes herself vulnerable in all sorts of ways. Some of this would really hit home if I were to tell anyone similar things. There’s a lot of wisdom and insight being passed along here. But that’s one thing which makes the book really great and no wonder the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Jefferson also won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism/Criticism for her work with the New York Times. Another thing which contributes to the success of the book is the Jefferson’s easy mastery of language. It’s clear and yet literary in a wonderfully accessible way. Back in the days, (and probably today too), wealthy and aspiring Blacks were “privileged” while Whites were “entitled.” That’s a big difference – a huge difference – and it’s based on color. So Jefferson talks about shades of brown and hits the racism associated with colors light enough to pass easily for white to the never-pass of ebony. She discusses members of her own family who either reject white culture altogether or go the other way and pass for white (until they retire?). Her father was the head of pediatrics at the oldest black hospital in Chicago and tremendously proud of his success. Her mother was a socialite and their children (2 girls) were sent to the best schools, often white private ones. Margot’s sister Denise became a noted dance educator. The book covers the 1950s when Jefferson was a child in upscale schools and then living down the road from the University of Chicago. It goes on to include the 1960s and ’70s when the US was in turmoil with both race riots and draft protests as well as the war in Vietnam itself. And then the 1980s when change was in the air but not in the enforcement of the law. The kids helped change the morés and the fashion, but the ideas only mutated from the old social attitudes which came from the Victorian era. And women’s rights and status were barely touched until the 1980s. The last couple chapters get a bit draggy with Jefferson analyzing Little Women in terms of the roles and temperaments of young women, not necessarily black women. And then some nostalgia creeps in when she talks about Marshall Fields and other cultural traditions of Chicago. Book Review: "Negroland: A Memoir" I n the summer of 1956, nine-year-old Margo Jefferson, her older sister Denise, and their parents — a doctor and a socialite — arrived at a hotel in Atlantic City, the last stop on a family vacation. The Jeffersons were looking forward to spending time at the beach, but their mood soon shifted. First, the white hotel clerk pretended he couldn’t find their reservation; then he gave them a shabby room. The achievements Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson had worked so hard for — their means, education, and social status in Chicago — suddenly counted for nothing. Instead, the couple was reduced to what Jefferson calls “Mr. and Mrs. Negro Nobody with their Negro children from somewhere in Niggerland.” The distinction between “Negro,” which Jefferson thinks is a “word of wonders, glorious and terrible,” and “nigger,” which appears only a handful of times in her memoir Negroland , signifies the tenuous division between the black elite and the black masses. In Negroland, that “small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” the black elite may try to separate themselves, but they pay a high price for their isolation. Born in Chicago in 1947, Jefferson ’71JRN, a former theater critic for the New York Times and a current professor of writing at Columbia, is a member of the black elite by birth. The Jefferson girls attended highly ranked private schools, joined exclusive black clubs, and spent their summers at the very best camps. But with their privilege came responsibility. Children had to be indoctrinated into the world of black exceptionalism, so Jefferson quickly learned to “be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.” As the descendants of house slaves and freed slaves, the black middle class inherited the rigid politics of respectability, through which they hoped black humanity might be validated. Thus, this group sought to establish themselves as superior to other blacks and thereby more deserving of white approval. Perfect manners, polished clothing, and light skin helped distinguish the elite as members of a “Third Race,” among whom group identity far outweighed individual identity. It is precisely this separation from the rest of the black community that makes Jefferson resent being asked to befriend the new kid at summer camp. After she assesses with clear disdain the boy’s dark skin and “bad hair,” she begrudgingly speaks to the newcomer. In this moment, she is forced to confront a kind of blackness that she perceives as invasive and threatening, one that disturbs her world’s social order. Though Jefferson looks back on this and so many other experiences with deep-rooted guilt, the classism and anti-blackness that permeate the world of Negroland are still cringeworthy. Jefferson’s honest and astute examination of the black bourgeois in Negroland is everything you’d expect from a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic. As a participant observer, she simultaneously critiques and celebrates this insular world. We happily indulge Jefferson as she relishes the best memories of her small community — glamorous parties, carefree moments in South Side hair salons, and Lena Horne on The Frank Sinatra Timex Show . And she tries to evade the requirements of Negroland (“you don’t tell your secrets to strangers — certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure”) largely by sharing her past through a series of vignettes. Jefferson jumps back and forth in time, alternates between first- and third-person narrative, and buries the more intimate details of her personal past in shrewd historical analysis. The format, perhaps intentionally, makes Negroland read more like a cultural memoir than a personal one. It also gives the impression that Jefferson may be reluctant to fully tell her own story, a discomfort that, to her credit, she addresses directly: “How does someone like this, so often ashamed of what she is, always ashamed of what she lacks, write about herself?” This shame makes it understandable, though no less frustrating, that she keeps so much of her personal life private. By the time Jefferson enrolled at Brandeis University, her cultural views had begun to shift. It was the mid-sixties, and she was free to experience the world outside the confines of Negroland. With that freedom came transformative realizations about the weight of her privilege. In the era of Black Power, the features of Negroland began to look like “a corruption of The Race, a wrongful deviation,” Jefferson writes. She realized for the first time how internalizing the white gaze had hurt the black elite. “We’d let ourselves become tools of oppression in the black community. We’d settled for a desiccated white facsimile and abandoned a vital black culture.” But the cost of life in Negroland is never more apparent than in the late seventies when, as a young journalist, Jefferson develops an obsession with suicide. We watch the morbid manifestation of years of internalizing rigid guidelines for white beauty, deportment, and accomplishment, as Jefferson practices ways to end her life. But suicide is a luxury usually reserved for white women. Black women “were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses,” Jefferson notes. “We had a legacy. We were too strong for that.” And, so, she craves the rare opportunity to undo the social order that ignores black women’s humanity. Though she never fully escapes her shame, Jefferson does ultimately recognize that Negroland, in all its complexity, is a part of who she is. More importantly, she learns to embrace her individual identity as a priority above her collective cultural identity. “Now you can imagine yourself as central,” Jefferson explains. “It feels grand. But don’t stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.” Margo Jefferson is a professor of writing at Columbia’s School of the Arts. She worked for years as a theater and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times and has written for Vogue , New York magazine, and the New Republic . She is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. ‘Negroland: A Memoir’ by Margo Jefferson *** Margo Jefferson’s memoir, Negroland , was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography following its publication in 2015. In this, her second book, Pulitzer Prize-winning Jefferson has set out to explore the idea of “Negroland”, which she defines as ‘a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty’. The book’s blurb calls Negroland ‘at once incendiary and icy, celebratory and elegiac – here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, class and American culture old through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education.’ Jefferson sees herself as a ‘chronicler’ of “Negroland”, ‘a participant – observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.’ Of her choice to invent the term “Negroland”, she writes: ‘I call it Negroland because I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates.’ She later comments: ‘”Negro” is the magic word, the spell. The small grow large, the mundane turns exceptional, and the individual becomes cosmic.’ In his review, Hilton Als writes: ‘Jefferson has lived and worked like the great reporter she is, traversing a little-known or -understood landscape peopled by blacks and whites, dreamers and naysayers, the privileged and the strivers who make up the mosaic known as America.’ Aminatta Forna comments: ‘It would be too easy to call Negroland a groundbreaking work and yet this is exactly what it is. In her descriptions of a life lived on the nexus of race and class Margo Jefferson tells a tale of how people create, defy and survive systems of exclusion and inclusion, of the human toll that must be exacted.’ Eula Biss believes that Negroland provides ‘… the record of a powerful mind grappling with all the trouble of being awake.’ Jefferson herself grew up in a wealthy family in Chicago, to a doctor father and well-educated, ‘fashionable socialite’ mother, who opted to stay at home and look after her two daughters. She is concerned throughout about the way in which others perceived her upbringing and her family’s societal position. She comments: ‘Nothing highlighted our privilege more than the menace to it. Inside the race we were the self-designated aristocrats, educated, affluent, accomplished; to Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers.’ Negroland was a real step away for me from the usual non-fiction which I consume. I have read rather a few memoirs of late which have been set in the United States, but these have dealt almost exclusively with the stark realities of poverty and racism, and the disadvantages which the lower classes often have. I found it fascinating, therefore, to be given a completely different view of American society, of the upper-class black community who lived in wealthy parts of Chicago. Jefferson begins her memoir by discussing the perils and contradictions which one must face when writing about oneself: ‘I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles… So let me turn back, subdue my individual self, and enter history.’ She goes on to address elements of black history specific to the United States, and moves on to write about racial stereotyping, general ignorance, media portrayals, and beauty regimens, amongst other themes. Negroland is a memoir both personal and universal to those of the author’s class and race. Jefferson sets her own memories, largely of childhood and her years as a young adult, against the wider political and social landscape of America at its ‘crucial historical moments – the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America’. When she writes about historical occurrences, she does so using the present- tense. This is something which I had not seen in a memoir before; there is usually such a distinction between past and present. When Jefferson grew up, during a highly tumultuous period for black people in the United States, she reflects that children in “Negroland” ‘were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.’ She justifies the choices which she makes in this memoir not to reflect too much upon the present day, and instead focus upon the past, by writing: ‘… I belong to an earlier generation, that of the fifties and sixties: it’s us and our predecessors I want to write of. Most whites knew little about us; only a few cared to know… We were taught that we were better than the whites who looked down on us – that we were better than most whites, period. But that this would rarely if ever be acknowledged by white people, with all their entitlement. Not the entitlement a government provides, but the kind history bestows. This is your birthright, says history.’ What I found fascinating, and incredibly sad, was the discussion about other black people Jefferson’s family knew, who felt more comfortable hiding themselves within society by posing as white people: ‘So many in my parents’ world had relatives who’d spent their adult lives as white people of some kind. Avocational passing was lighthearted. Shopping at whites-only stores, getting deferential service at whites-only restaurants. You came home snickering…’. Also chilling is the space which Jefferson gives to discussing the prevalence of suicide attempts amongst black youths of her generation, and her revelation of her own contemplations of suicide. Jefferson’s writing is elegant, and certainly has a journalistic flair to it. She puts across such interesting perspectives, some of which I had never considered before. Jefferson’s authorial voice is strong, and after I got used to the fragmented style which some of her sentences hold, I found myself pulled in. At first, Negroland does not take the form of a linear narrative – rather, it is more playful – but the later sections which deal with elements of the author’s schooling have been presented chronologically. The oft-broken structure has connecting themes within it, and the whole does come together relatively well. Regardless that there is so much of importance within the book, I did not quite connect with it in the way that I’d hoped. I felt as though there was a level of detachment within the book, due largely to the creativity which Jefferson employs. So much has been considered in Negroland , and there is a lot for the reader to mull over long after the final page has been read. I shall end this review with a most poignant question in Jefferson’s book: ‘What manner of man and woman are we? Wherever we go we disrupt order.’ Margo Jefferson’s ‘Negroland: A Memoir’ The phrase “Black Lives Matter,” which emerged as a rallying cry during a year of frequent deadly showdowns between police officers and unarmed black citizens, has almost always been pointed at whites. It’s a way of saying, Stop discounting us. Stop mowing us down with your hatred, fear and disregard. But “Black Lives Matter” might just as easily have been the mantra of America’s black elite who, as far back as before the abolition of slavery, sought to establish themselves in communities characterized by privilege and extreme class consciousness. Of course for them, the phrase would have been transmitted insularly, from one to another, as a reminder of how much was riding upon their success at not merely performing gentility but also believing in the inviolable dignity that gentility has always been thought to confer. Why? Because believing a thing like that will make you less susceptible to everything America has concocted to turn you right back into chattel. In her new memoir, Margo Jefferson, a former critic at The New York Times, chronicles a lifetime as a member of Chicago’s black elite, a world she celebrates and problematizes by christening it (and her book) Negroland. “Negroland,” she writes, “is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.” That warning — that manner of instilling in children the understanding that with privilege comes responsibility — strikes me as the true impetus for Jefferson’s book. For once we become accustomed to delicious glimpses of Negroland’s impeccable manners and outfits, the meticulously orchestrated social opportunities and fastidiously maintained hairstyles, what we begin to notice is the cost and weight of this heavy collective burden. Jefferson’s memoir pushes against the boundaries of its own genre. Yes, it begins with a scene from the author’s childhood. And yes, we learn about Jefferson’s older sister, Denise, and their parents: a father who was the longtime head of pediatrics at Provident, once the nation’s oldest black hospital; and a mother who was an impeccably dressed socialite. But it quickly swerves into social history; a good 30 pages of the book’s opening are dedicated to defining and chronicling the rise of America’s black upper class. Such unwillingness to abide by the conventions of genre also informs Jefferson’s approach to herself as the vehicle of her story. She remains conscious, possibly even suspicious, of the two roles she has signed on to play: character in and curator of these many poignant memories. At times, this self-consciousness urges Jefferson to announce to the reader when and why a passage’s train of thought or tactical approach will abruptly change: “I’m going to change my tone now. I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself” or “Let’s look at this from a third-person perspective. It will impose, or at least suggest, more intellectual and emotional control.” But these willful shifts that advertise their own motives are effective because they beg to be read as a corrective to a lifetime of enforced and internalized decorum. “Keep a close watch,” Jefferson advises the reader. For what? For all the signs that underscore the difference between privilege — which is provisional and “can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn” — and its white counterpart: entitlement. Privilege is what the blacks in Negroland earned and fought to maintain. Privilege is a far cry from entitlement, which has the luxury of being “impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege.” Entitlement is what sent two little white neighbor girls over to the Jeffersons’ swing set every afternoon while Margo and Denise were napping (the white girls would never have set foot in the yard while the sisters were awake). Privilege is what informed Mrs. Jefferson’s gentle request for the visits to cease: “ ‘Girls,’ she said calmly but firmly, ‘Margo and Denise are taking their naps. They won’t be down to play, so you can go home.’ ” Eventually the little white girls stopped trespassing, but Jefferson’s mother still harbors shame, more than 60 years later, at having been too intimidated to confront their mother. I’ll put that another way: The visible narrative apparatus of “Negroland” highlights its author’s extreme vulnerability in the face of her material. It also makes apparent the all-too-often invisible fallout of our nation’s ongoing obsession with race and class: Namely, that living a life as an exemplar of black excellence — and living with the survivor’s guilt that often accompanies such excellence — can have a psychic effect nearly as deadening and dehumanizing as that of racial injustice itself. By the time we arrive at the memoir’s most deeply honest and troubling passages, where suicide becomes a preoccupation of the author’s early adulthood and an alarming fixture of the community she has been tracking, we have also come to understand how so much psychic trauma can run through a life where so little seems to be out of place. That’s a brave claim to make in 2015, where every week it seems someone without the comforts and cushions of an upbringing like Jefferson’s is being shot dead. And yet, doesn’t such frankness expand our sense of what black life is, of what we’ve made it into? Jefferson’s candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic’s mind, recall a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race, many of whom she directly references, refines and grapples with: James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier. Jefferson also invites women to the round table: Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid — and voices outside that established canon, like the contemporary poet and essayist Wendy S. Walters; and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, whose 1941 etiquette handbook, “The Correct Thing to Do — to Say — to Wear,” offered blacks a counternarrative to the one that said “perfect mastery of comportment’s rituals . . . like higher education, or high art, it is beyond your capacities.” How can a book so slim take on such mammoth considerations and manage them with such efficacy? Perhaps because we gain entry via one girl and, later, the woman she becomes. Perhaps because no matter how conscious Jefferson makes us of societal circumstances, what drives “Negroland” is an abiding commitment to the primacy of the individual. There are drawbacks to this approach. The only character we ever truly get to know is Jefferson herself (and even then only in glimpses and asides and confessions); everyone else is thin, airy, illustrative, anecdotal. By such an emphasis on the self and its self-consciousness, Jefferson is not so much inviting a reader into her world as into its consequences. But what we gain from such a choice is revelatory: recognition of the nuance, fragmentation and fragility of a single black life begging to be considered on its own terms and in its own voice. Aren’t all of us, no matter who we are, living for the rare moments when we can forget about the collective we belong to and just be? And what does it mean that, for everyone who can’t lay claim to uncontested entitlement, the opportunities for just being are discouragingly few? Close to the end of the book, Jefferson asks, “How do you adapt your singular, willful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honor and betrayal?” It’s the kind of question that can reanimate a phrase like “Black Lives Matter,” which may be well on its way to having run its course. It’s a question not just for blacks or whites, but for the ages.