Negroland: A Memoir
- 7h 59m 46s
- Margo Jefferson
- Blackstone Audio, Inc. dba Blackstone Publishing
- 2015
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.
In this Audiobook
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I was Taught to Avoid Showing Off …
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I'm a Chronicler of Negroland, …
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1861–1865 …
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March 6, 1944, Tombstone, Arizona …
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Are We Rich? …
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“Do We Have Indian Blood?” …
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In Negroland We Thought of …
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Denise and Margo Wear Matching Woolen Coats …
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Denise is in Our Parents' Bedroom …
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Every Month I Study the Ebony Magazines …
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Sit on the Stairs with …
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Our Parents Wanted Us to …
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All the Bright Young Faces, …
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I Think it's Too Easy to …
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But I Have to Turn My Mind …
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Sixth Grade Gave Me Proof, for the First Time …
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University High: 1960–1964 …
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Brandeis University, 1964–1968 …
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In Negroland Boys Learned Early How to Die …
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Practice, Practice, Practice …
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Looking Back, I Think My …
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So Much Melancholy, I Think, Reading These Pages …
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Once, Maybe Ten Years Ago, …
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I Believe it's Too Easy to Recount …
