National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Autobiography, 2015.

At 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.

Born 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. 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". 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. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Product details

Listening Length	7 hours and 59 minutes
Author	Margo Jefferson
Narrator	Robin Miles
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	November 19, 2015
Publisher	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English

NEGROLAND: A MEMOIR