Negroland a Memoir by Margo Jefferson Negroland by Margo Jefferson Review – Life in the Black Upper Class

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of entitlement; the former have to make do with a sense of privilege that is provisional – one that can be withheld or withdrawn.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.

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