Negroland Literary Elements

Memoir

Set in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s

Written in first-person, second-person plural, and third-person from Jefferson’s perspective.

Explicative, Self-critical

The protagonist is African-Americans and the antagonist is racism.

Jefferson delves into the world of upper-class black communities who live in between the facets that define whiteness and blackness. Though she grew up as a child with black privilege and plenty she addresses the racial prejudices and the challenges she encountered.

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The history of race relations during the American civil war foreshadows the racial tensions and prejudices that Jefferson experiences in her childhood.

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Jefferson references W. E. B. Du Bois’ work.

“Unlike its predecessors, The Souls of Black Folk excites intellectual debate and stirs serious readers on both sides of the increasingly rigid color line.”

“James Baldwin is proclaiming right of entry with every possessive pronoun, integrating America by means of grammar and syntax. No demonstrators hosed into the air and crashing onto pavements, no tear-gassed bodies coughing and twisting, no children your age dressed in exhaustively clean, pressed clothes to walk shielded by armed guards into schools built to deny them.”

“The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want.”

“In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked.”

“… we trade bonds on Wall Street”

Wall Street is a synecdoche for the financial district in New York City.

“Suavely complicated marriages and urbane extramarital liaisons”