A deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture seen through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among Chicago's black elite.<br><br> 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.<br><br> 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 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.''<br><br> 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 heartwrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.<br><br>
