Larry Wilmore, a comedian, is unfairly criticized for his tart-tongued stand-up comment about Barack Obama, unless thought of in light of Jefferson’s memoir. Jefferson lightly touches on the history of slavery and its societal consequence, but she personalizes that history in explaining how she became Margo Jefferson, an accomplished theatre critic, and professor. However, there is an extra layer of complexity for Jefferson because of her color. Jefferson wrestles with many of the same baby to teenage insecurities all Americans face in their generation. It sharply defines answers to many questions rarely asked by Americans. What makes Jefferson’s memoir interesting is her middle class upbringing. She is raised in Chicago by two professional middle class parents i.e. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.Īre you black enough? Are you white enough? Are you female enough? Are you male enough? Are you American enough? Margo Jefferson’s memoir is a perspective on growing up in America. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the Civil Rights Movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America - Margo Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Since the 19th century, they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty". National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Autobiography, 2015.Īt once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac - here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of Margo Jefferson's rarefied upbringing and education among a Black elite concerned with distancing itself from Whites and the Black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.īorn in upper-crust Black Chicago - her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest Black hospital her mother was a socialite - Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society.
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