Manners to please grandparents and quell the doubts of any white strangers loitering to observe your behavior in schools, stores and restaurants.” “Good diction for all occasions skin care (no ashy knees or elbows) hair cultivation (a ceaseless round of treatments to eradicate the bushy and nappy). “Gloves, handkerchiefs, pocketbooks for each occasion,” she writes. This meant mastering a “rigorous vocabulary of femininity” that Ms. In part it’s also her own story, and a primer on being what she calls a “Good Negro Girl” in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. “I lived with its meanings and intimations,” she says, “for so long.” It was a word that dominated her childhood. “A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations.” (The author was born in 1947.) “I call it Negroland because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonder, glorious and terrible,” she writes. She has her own term for this elite, at least as regards her generation. Jefferson attends to its manners and mores and central figures, and traces its shifting names, which include “the colored elite,” “the colored 400” and “the blue vein society.” In part it’s a history of the upper strata of black society in America.
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