Negroland: A Memoir
By Margo Jefferson, Pantheon, 256 pages, $25
The phrase “Black Lives Matter”, which emerged as a rallying cry during a year of frequent deadly showdowns between police officers and unarmed black citizens in the United States, has almost always been pointed at whites. It’s a way of saying, stop discounting us. Stop mowing us down with your hatred, fear and disregard.
But “Black Lives Matter” might just as easily have been the mantra of America’s black elite who, as far back as before the abolition of slavery, sought to establish themselves in communities characterised by privilege and extreme class consciousness.
Of course for them, the phrase would have been transmitted insularly, from one to another, as a reminder of how much was riding upon their success at not merely performing gentility but also believing in the inviolable dignity that gentility has always been thought to confer. Why? Because believing a thing like that will make you less susceptible to everything America has concocted to turn you right back into chattel.
In her new memoir, Margo Jefferson, a former critic at “The New York Times”, chronicles a lifetime as a member of Chicago’s black elite, a world she celebrates and problematises by christening it (and her book) Negroland. “Negroland,” she writes, “is my 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.”
That warning — that manner of instilling in children the understanding that with privilege comes responsibility — strikes me as the true impetus for Jefferson’s book. For once we become accustomed to delicious glimpses of Negroland’s impeccable manners and outfits, the meticulously orchestrated social opportunities and fastidiously maintained hairstyles, what we begin to notice is the cost and weight of this heavy collective burden.
Jefferson’s memoir pushes against the boundaries of its own genre. Yes, it begins with a scene from the author’s childhood. And yes, we learn about Jefferson’s older sister, Denise, and their parents: a father who was the longtime head of paediatrics at Provident, once the nation’s oldest black hospital; and a mother who was an impeccably dressed socialite. But it quickly swerves into social history; a good 30 pages of the book’s opening are dedicated to defining and chronicling the rise of America’s black upper class.
Such unwillingness to abide by the conventions of genre also informs Jefferson’s approach to herself as the vehicle of her story. She remains conscious, possibly even suspicious, of the two roles she has signed on to play: character in and curator of these many poignant memories.
At times, this self-consciousness urges Jefferson to announce to the reader when and why a passage’s train of thought or tactical approach will abruptly change: “I’m going to change my tone now. I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself” or “Let’s look at this from a third-person perspective. It will impose, or at least suggest, more intellectual and emotional control.” But these wilful shifts that advertise their own motives are effective because they beg to be read as a corrective to a lifetime of enforced and internalised decorum.
“Keep a close watch,” Jefferson advises the reader. For what? For all the signs that underscore the difference between privilege — which is provisional and “can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn” — and its white counterpart: entitlement. Privilege is what the blacks in Negroland earned and fought to maintain. Privilege is a far cry from entitlement, which has the luxury of being “impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege”.
Entitlement is what sent two little white neighbour girls over to the Jeffersons’ swing set every afternoon while Margo and Denise were napping (the white girls would never have set foot in the yard while the sisters were awake). Privilege is what informed Mrs Jefferson’s gentle request for the visits to cease: “‘Girls,’ she said calmly but firmly, ‘Margo and Denise are taking their naps. They won’t be down to play, so you can go home.’”
Eventually the little white girls stopped trespassing, but Jefferson’s mother still harbours shame, more than 60 years later, at having been too intimidated to confront their mother.
I’ll put that another way: the visible narrative apparatus of “Negroland” highlights its author’s extreme vulnerability in the face of her material. It also makes apparent the all-too-often invisible fallout of America’s ongoing obsession with race and class: living a life as an exemplar of black excellence — and living with the survivor’s guilt that often accompanies such excellence — can have a psychic effect nearly as deadening and dehumanising as that of racial injustice itself.
By the time we arrive at the memoir’s most deeply honest and troubling passages, where suicide becomes a preoccupation of the author’s early adulthood and an alarming fixture of the community she has been tracking, we have also come to understand how so much psychic trauma can run through a life where so little seems to be out of place.
That’s a brave claim to make in 2015, where every week it seems someone without the comforts and cushions of an upbringing like Jefferson’s is being shot dead. And yet, doesn’t such frankness expand our sense of what black life is, of what we’ve made it into? Jefferson’s candour, and the courage and rigour of her critic’s mind, recall a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race, many of whom she directly references, refines and grapples with: James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier.
Jefferson also invites women to the round table: Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid — and voices outside that established canon, such as the contemporary poet and essayist Wendy S. Walters, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, whose 1941 etiquette handbook, “The Correct Thing to Do — to Say — to Wear”, offered blacks a counternarrative to the one that said “perfect mastery of comportment’s rituals ... like higher education, or high art, it is beyond your capacities”.
How can a book so slim take on such mammoth considerations and manage them with such efficacy? Perhaps because we gain entry via one girl and, later, the woman she becomes. Perhaps because no matter how conscious Jefferson makes us of societal circumstances, what drives “Negroland” is an abiding commitment to the primacy of the individual.
There are drawbacks to this approach. The only character we ever truly get to know is Jefferson herself (and even then only in glimpses and asides and confessions); everyone else is thin, airy, illustrative, anecdotal. By such an emphasis on the self and its self-consciousness, Jefferson is not so much inviting a reader into her world as into its consequences.
But what we gain from such a choice is revelatory: recognition of the nuance, fragmentation and fragility of a single black life begging to be considered on its own terms and in its own voice. Aren’t all of us, no matter who we are, living for the rare moments when we can forget about the collective we belong to and just be? And what does it mean that, for everyone who can’t lay claim to uncontested entitlement, the opportunities for just being are discouragingly few?
Close to the end of the book, Jefferson asks, “How do you adapt your singular, wilful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honour and betrayal?” It’s the kind of question that can reanimate a phrase such as “Black Lives Matter”, which may be well on its way to having run its course. It’s a question not just for blacks or whites, but for the ages.
–New York Times News Service
Tracy K. Smith’s books include the memoir “Ordinary Light” and the poetry collection “Life on Mars”, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.
