At once incendiary and icy, mischievous, and provocative, celebratory and elegiac, a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the authors 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 1947 in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nations 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 nineteenth 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.
