Margo Jefferson’s memoir tackles life in Chicago’s black elite circle

Margo Jefferson's memoir, 'Negroland,” grew out of several intersecting impulses.

First, the Pulitzer Prize-winning theater and book critic and author of 'On Michael Jackson” was ready to try something new.

'I felt I needed to go in a different direction. I need to try different things,” Jefferson said in a phone interview.

While casting about for that new direction, she realized she had quite a bit of material about her life 'semi-collected” and that she had reached an age where she could engage with that material.

'I knew I needed enough perspective,” Jefferson, who is 68, said. 'I certainly couldn't have written it in my 20s or 30s.”

And she was deeply aware that the older generation, which would be central to her story, was passing away. 'I needed to think about them, talk to them, collect memories and facts before it's gone,” she said.

A funding opportunity moved the project forward. 'I finally organized my thoughts when I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship,” she said. She was awarded the fellowship in 2008, but said by that point the project had enough momentum that she would have written 'Negroland” even if she hadn't received the funding.

'Negroland,” which recently earned the author a National Book Critics Circle Award, explores Jefferson's life as a member of the black elite in Chicago in the middle of the 20th century. As the book reveals, such a social status was fraught with challenges and contradictions, as members of the black bourgeoisie sought to stand apart from both whites and lower class blacks.

Jefferson eschewed a chronological approach to her story. She doesn't begin with her early life - rather, she delves deep into American history - nor does she take a linear route through her experiences.

'I'm a magpie. I work jumping from point to point ... I wanted to find a way to follow the jumps,” she said, comparing her work to a collage.

But her magpie urges weren't the only reason to approach her narrative in a different way.

'We live chronologically, but, especially as we're growing up, we also live associatively.” Children, she suggested, learn in shifting ways as they encounter various adults in their lives and attempt to play the role each expects of them. 'I was writing about a world with a lot of roles.”

For black people of Jefferson's socio-economic class, those roles could be particularly diverse, and the need to shift between them could be demanding. She sought to replicate some of that feeling in the text of 'Negroland.”

'The world is very much about quick changes and performances, and I wanted to get that into the formal structure of the book.” She thought carefully about how to replicate those experiences on the page: 'How can I use dialogue, scene changes, different voices as I unfold the story?”

At the same time, she didn't want to lose the reader along the way. A conversation with her editor led her to carefully consider the balance between the jumps in her narrative and the book's overall structure. 'The reader still has to have something to hold onto,” she said. 'A collage has to be visibly coherent to the readers.”

Jefferson always kept in mind that those readers would come from a variety of backgrounds and would bring a variety of life experiences to the text.

'I'm always aware of various audiences, as a part of my training as a journalist and as part of my training as a citizen of Negroland,” she said. Her hope for those audiences is that readers might 'recognize the distinctions and the differences between their story and the story I'm telling,” while also looking for the ways in which her story might connect to their own.

'How do you make those translations?” The question is an important one for Jefferson - and one that has no simple answer. Her story isn't a simple one.

'It's a complex story, and theirs is, too,” she said. 'We all live with incredible complexity.”