“He was not really a negro anymore,” Jefferson writes. Jefferson's parents' looked down on Uncle Lucious not because he passed,"but because he had risen no higher than a traveling salesman.”Īnd Uncle Archie, in retirement, he returned to his racial roots. Jefferson writes about Uncle Lucious who passed for white and worked as a traveling salesman. That is the racial turncoats, the former tribal members who absconded with their ambivalent racial bloodlines and passed for white. But there is a fate worst than living in Negroland. This memoir is about flawed people – those who lived with the racial burden of being ‘Negro.” The inhabitants of Negroland are torn and tormented to outsiders, they are neither white enough nor black enough. “Life in Negroland meant that any conversation could be taken over by the White Man at any moment,” Jefferson writes. Home does not even provide shelter from the spectre of racism. The celebrant’s mother, after all, is from Georgia. The lack of an invite to a sweet sixteen birthday party. For example, on a cross country trip with an unfortunate stopover in Atlantic City, where despite their hotel reservations, the Jeffersons were consigned to inferior accommodations and couldn’t eat in the hotel’s restaurant.
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