Negroland:
A Memoir
Margo
Jefferson (Pantheon Books, 2015)
Negroland
is a memoir, and a meditation, on growing up privileged but
black, or black but privileged. Margo Jefferson was born in Chicago,
in 1947, to prosperous parents: her father was head of pediatrics at
the nation's oldest black hospital, and her mother stayed home to
raise two daughters. Margo and her sister went to private school,
mainly with white children. They met their black peers at Jack and
Jill, an organization dedicated to social and cultural enrichment for
the future doctors, lawyers, and teachers they were presumed to be.
In calling
that culture 'Negroland', Jefferson is looking back into a time when
the term 'Negro' framed a hard-won and fiercely defended
respectability. In spite of, or because of, the fact that they could
expect so little respect in white quarters, the matriarchs of
Negroland brought up their children to exacting standards of
grooming, dress, and manners. For fear of disgracing their people,
the Jefferson girls could not appear in public with ashy skin or
unkempt hair; they could not wear denim (except at camp) or
too-bright colors; they could not laugh too loud.
There's
something isolating about all this, of course. It places this
self-conscious elite at a remove from the mass of black people
without quite admitting them to the upper classes as viewed by white
America. Jefferson's memoir doesn't tell a major dramatic story, but
it locates the drama in some small ones: her father, pulled over in
Hyde Park because he doesn't look like he lives there; and her uncle
Lucious, who passed for white in his working life, then failed to fit
in when he retired and returned to black life. "And my parents
looked down on him a little. Not because he'd passed, but because
he'd risen no higher than traveling salesman. If you were going to
take the trouble to be white, you were supposed to do better than you
could have done as a Negro."
Margo is,
most of the time, an avid participant in the uplift on offer. She
plays the piano, acts in plays, and goes out for cheerleading. She
spends three summers at Interlochen, winning prizes for her
enthusiasm and talent. She loves Audrey Hepburn and Diahann Carroll,
Robert Browning and Langston Hughes, Ebony and Vogue.
It's a very bright childhood, though marked at intervals by
cautionary tales from her mother, because the costs of going off the
rails are so very high.
And,
always, of those to whom much is given, much will be expected, and
that can be wearing. "We were to be ladies, responsible Negro
Women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or
unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a
legacy. We were too strong for that." By way of rebellion,
Jefferson cultivates an aesthetic of suicide for a time, though by
then she's a successful journalist and literary critic. (Sylvia Plath
never had to worry about ashy elbows.) And she declines the
imperative to become a wife and mother, though she's delighted with
her sister's daughter.
Negroland
tells old truths that shouldn't be too scary to tell; it tells old
secrets that deserve to be freed from the power of secrecy. If
Jefferson's grandmothers were proud to the point of snobbishness,
well, they had much to be proud of. Her own reward for the
awkwardness of being the only black child in her class was an
education befitting her intelligence. The candor, integrity, and
tenderness of this memoir show that while Jefferson was being taught
manners, she also acquired character, which is always a beautiful
thing.
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