A review by cokechukwu
Negroland by Margo Jefferson

2.0

“Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you.”

Memoirs are my least favorite kind of book. In my opinion, even more than novels do, they require a careful balance between what is said and what is left unsaid, between the moments that are emphasized and those that are elided. Most of the ones I have read so far don’t strike the right balance, and I think Jefferson’s is no exception. She had a lot to say about the history of the “Talented Tenth,” highlights in Black American history (exemplified by the achievements of Black stars of Hollywood, politics, business, etc.), and the social/political movements (civil rights, feminism) that shaped her life, but she was more circumspect about things more personal to her: not wanting marriage or children, her ascendence in journalism, her depression, and her relationships with her mother and sister, to name a few. She'd drop amazing lines (like the one quoted above) and then abruptly shift to abstraction and omission. As the book wore on, I found myself getting impatient and frustrated with the way Jefferson talked around instead of about her personal life, and how she seemed to back away whenever she veered too close to being deeply revealing.

I think Jefferson was trying to use the larger cultural-political-historical milieu to provide helpful context for the beliefs and practices of the Black elite in general and her Black elite family in particular. “The personal is political” and all that. Unfortunately, her personal story got lost in the litany of famous names and a detached, academic writing style. Maybe my expectations would have been set more appropriately if this had been marketed as a sociological study of the Black upper middle class. As a memoir, it left me pretty cold.