Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times culture and book critic Margo Jefferson (On Michael Jackson) and her family moved to Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood in the 1960s, after spending her childhood in the more middle-class Park Manor bungalows. Negroland is her memoir of the challenges and particular circumstances of growing up in what she calls the "Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians."
Her father was the head of pediatrics at Provident, the country's oldest black hospital. Her mother was active in the national black social club the Northeasterners. Jefferson and her sister, Denise, belonged to the national children's club Jack and Jill of America, and attended K-12 classes at the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory School--an integrated school. From such relative comfort, Jefferson moved on to college at Brandeis, struggled to define her place in the social turmoil of feminism and civil rights, and entered the competitive New York City world of professional criticism and academia.
Jefferson's frank discussion of her own experiences in the relatively narrow "third race" adds a fresh, nuanced perspective to the United States' continuing discussion about race. She summarizes her own ambivalence in Negroland's conclusion: "There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think.... And then I tell myself, so what? Go on." While this may echo Samuel Beckett's famous conclusion to his novel The Unnamable: "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on," the source of her determination is wholly rooted in her distinctive experience. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.