In the book’s opening pages, Jefferson admits to being reluctant to write about herself: “I was taught you don’t tell your secrets to strangers-certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure.

“ Negroland is my word for this somewhat rarified, specialized world previously known as the colored elite, the Negro elite, the talented 10th-in my day, terms referring to privileged, carefully self-defined Negroes,” Jefferson explains.Īs someone who is passionately interested-both professionally and personally-in cultural behavior, Jefferson found it was no stretch to explore the realities, myths, and contradictions of black people living in a bubble they knew to be extraordinary and unusual within their own culture. Oh, and there’s that Guggenheim Fellowship she won in 2008 for a forthcoming book-the one pubbing this September, the full title of which is Negroland: A Memoir (Pantheon). As an instructor, she’s inspired students in the writing classes she’s taught at Princeton, the New School, New York University, and, currently, Columbia. She is an intellectual, but she’s a bubbly one, genuinely interested in others as individuals, not just subjects to be dryly analyzed. But behind-and within-Jefferson’s work is an exuberant curiosity about why people act as they do. It’s easy to be a critic, as the snarky saying goes. And “Scenes from a Life in Negroland,” an excerpt from her book that was first published in Guernica, will be included in The Best American Essays 2015, edited by Ariel Levy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct.). Her work has appeared in a torrent of publications, including Newsweek, New York magazine, Vogue, and Harper’s, and her essays have been anthologized in the Best African American Essays 2009, edited by Gerald Early and Randall Kennedy (One World/Ballantine). Jefferson, an esteemed journalist known for her book reviews and cultural criticism, won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995 while she was the Sunday theater critic at the New York Times.

In this, the 21st century, seeing a book with an incendiary title like Negroland might evoke the side-eye from some: this author may have some explaining to do!īut another look reveals that, in this case, the author behind the title is Margo Jefferson-and suddenly, that’s explanation enough.

Negroland review