Negroland by Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson grew up in the late 1940s and 50s, in an area of Chicago she describes as ‘Negroland’. This was a time when her class and location offered a paradoxical ‘privilege’ in terms of being black in America.

Certainly, the sheltered elite living in this enclave experienced a lifestyle very different to those in the rest of the country during the period – yet there still existed a gulf between black and white elites. Jefferson uses the highly charged word ‘Negro’, she writes, 'as a word of wonder, glorious and terrible', and because the word introduced and developed her own ideas and experience of race.

And this personal experience is of course key; Negroland is a memoir. But Jefferson combines her own memories with elements of the broader academic history of black communities in America, slavery and societal structures. As an overall text it can take real effort to engage with, especially if approaching the work without background knowledge of the key historcal points that the story weaves around: the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America.

Slowly, however, the more evocative stories will draw the reader back. This can be read start to finish as the memoir it is, or treated as an encyclopaedia to dip into for specific information. It is an important and deeply interesting text on a little known slice of history.