This OPAC will be unavailable for a few hours beginning 6PM on Saturday, April 20, 2024 for planned upgrades. The OPAC should be back up to regular operation Sunday, April 21, 2024.
A meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of 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--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." 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--Jefferson charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.
CD Audiobook
