Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson, Granta, £12.99
In this beautifully evoked narrative of her childhood and youth in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, with its potent mixture of irony and wistfulness, Margo Jefferson shows what it means to have grown up as an African American. Actually, Jefferson repudiates that phrase as “strictly for official discourse”, stating that as a writer, a journalist and a critic, she “grew up as a Negro and usually calls herself black”.
The book makes entire sense of Michelle Obama’s stirring speech in support of Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democratic candidate when she reminded viewers that the White House was built by slaves – that is, her ancestors. Recalling this shocking history, one can understand why the title is deliberately challenging, describing “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty”.
Born in 1947 into a prosperous upper middle-class family – her father, who had fought in the war when the US army was still segregated, was a paediatrician – Jefferson makes it clear that whatever her parents did to promote the education, talents and social acceptability of their two daughters, to white Americans the family would always be regarded as “Just More Negroes”.
To explain the author’s search for her own identity, she writes: “I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible … a word for runaway slave posters. Its meanings were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or as we now say, how race was constructed.” In Chicago, where the aspiration was to live in an affluent white suburb, she comments wryly that “a very few Negro families lived nearly alone in a very few tenuously integrated suburbs”. The Civil Rights movement came later. Reading this memoir one wonders how much and how little a change in the law can actually alter deep-rooted attitudes towards race, the instinct for segregation rather than integration.
The author weaves the story of the American Civil War and its aftermath for the emancipated slaves with her own education in the subtle, yet essential distinctions between her people and others: “Inside the race we were the self-designated aristocrats, educated, affluent, accomplished; to Caucasians we were oddities, under-dogs and interlopers.”
There is also bitter humour in the book. Jefferson has never married and has no children. She believes that solitude has been necessary to her life because, having been “shaped by so many conventions, expectations and requirements, by so much dread of disapproval”, it is only in solitude that she has been able to discover her selfhood, her true identity. After all, she grew up learning that bad manners, poor taste, an excess of high spirits and showing off could put her family and her people at risk. The desire to fit in was always checked by its ultimate impossibility. Today she is a chronicler of “Negroland”, “a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometimes expatriate, ongoing interlocutor”.
This thoughtful memoir reminds one that questions of race and colour cannot be waved aside by East Coast liberal assumptions, or indeed by our own carefully constructed ideas of multiculturalism. Jefferson rejects them through her own life’s experiences.
For a Christian, there is always a further question, which she does not raise: how do we live out St Paul’s words that “In Christ there is no Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free”?
Jefferson is neither a person of colour (the politically correct English phrase) nor a woman of faith. Her book reminds us that you cannot so easily transcend natural barriers simply by climbing up the social ladder.
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