Negroland

Negroland is a 2015 memoir by American author and academic Margo Jefferson, a former theatre critic at the New York Times. The memoir focuses on Jefferson’s childhood in a community of affluent African-Americans in Chicago, but it is also a reflection on the history and status of America’s black elite more generally. Negroland won the 2016 National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

Jefferson opens her memoir by questioning her relationship to the genre, introducing the self-conscious narrative voice of the book:

“I was taught to avoid showing off.



“I was taught to distinguish myself through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off.

“But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?

“In my Negroland childhood, this was a perilous business.”



Jefferson was born into an affluent family in Chicago. Her father was a pediatrician and her mother a socialite. From a young age, Jefferson questioned her mother about her exact status and learned that her family was “upper class by Negro standards” and “upper-middle-class” by white standards, but “Just More Negroes” to most whites.

The enclave of black affluence in which Jefferson grew up was not only a physical location but also an ideological one, which she calls “Negroland,” her “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.”

Jefferson and her sister, Denise, were taught to hold themselves to impossibly high standards of conduct and presentation, and furthermore that the future of their race depended on their ability to maintain the respect of their white peers.



After this autobiographical opening, Jefferson offers a potted history of the black upper class, beginning with the work of lesser-known nineteenth-century black writers such as Joseph Willson (Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society) and Cyprian Clamorgan (The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis). Jefferson demonstrates that the work of major black writers like Ida B. Well and W.E.B. Du Bois emerges from this tradition and speaks back to it.

Jefferson turns next to her years at an exclusive private school, where the students were overwhelmingly white. Although popular, academic, and a talented student actor, Jefferson finds herself unable to make lasting friendships across the racial divide. For Jefferson and her sister, the typical angst of adolescence is compounded by their minority status in their peer group. For instance, Jefferson internalizes white beauty standards, spending many hours on a beauty regimen designed to avoid “ashy” skin and straightening her hair.

The girls also endure a constant stream of petty racist remarks and incidents. Her school friends ask her whether she knows the (black) janitor and whether she has “Indian blood.” Her class is taught to sing a song whose lyrics feature the word “darkie.” The white next-door neighbors forbid their children from playing with the Jefferson girls. Despite her talent, Margo finds herself cast as a maid in the school play. Denise’s dance teacher tells her that there will never be a black ballerina.



Jefferson arrives in college as the Civil Rights Movement is getting underway. There she begins to reject the ideology of Negroland, feeling that "The entitlements of Negroland were no longer relevant…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." Jefferson also throws herself into the feminist movement, discovering that it remains hostile to the experiences of non-white women.

Eventually, Jefferson begins to struggle. The heavy psychic burden of the standards she has held herself to, coupled with anger at the discovery that those standards were misguided, drives her into a depression. She discovers that both her family and her activist peers are unsupportive. The privilege of giving way to depression is one that “Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline…We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women.”

Jefferson discovers that she is not alone among the “Good Negro Girls” giving in to the psychic pressures of their restricted lives. As she begins entertaining suicidal thoughts—even drafting suicide notes—she learns of a rash of suicides in her “Negroland” community.



Jefferson concludes by bringing her life story up to the present. Although she is no longer suicidal or depressed, she continues to feel a need to “dismantle” herself and re-build herself anew. Nevertheless, she asks, “How do you adapt your singular, willful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honor and betrayal?”