Quotes by Margo Jefferson - Page 2

Every mind is a clutter of memories, images, inventions and age-old repetitions. It can be a ghetto, too, if a ghetto is a sealed-off, confined place. Or a sanctuary, where one is free to dream and think whatever one wants. For most of us it's both - and a lot more complicated.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Clutter
Complicated
Confined
Ghetto
Memories
Sanctuary
Age-Old
Images
Inventions
Repetitions
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I think, for a while, there was a kind of debate about whether you could bring back Negro and reclaim it, and then it was black versus African American; now I have noticed in conversation that black people will use all three terms depending on context. I don't advocate one term.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Debate
Term
Versus
Advocate
African
Bring
Context
Black People Will
Depending
Noticed
Reclaim
Terms
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Since pre-Emancipation, black 'females' have had to fight for the whites-only privilege of being deemed 'ladies': cultured, educated, sexually desirable in a socially respected way. Michelle Obama has managed to get all this without yielding her right to be smart and strong-willed.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Desirable
Educated
Sexually
Strong Willed
Cultured
Deemed
Females
Ladies
Michelle
Michelle Obama
Socially
Yielding
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Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Avant Garde
Inspire
Mass
Recognition
Respectable
Life Art Work
Double
Life Work Art
Imitators
Official
Receive
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I need to acknowledge the toll certain parts of my life are taking on me. I have to do that, even if it temporarily paralyzes me to suppress it. Otherwise, paradoxically, I can't go on. When I can reside in that, and recoup, then I can continue. In a strange way it's a survival method.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Acknowledge
Method
Strange
Survival
Life Me My Life
Otherwise
Paradoxically
Parts
Reside
Strange Way
Suppress
Temporarily
Toll
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Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Choreography
Interpreting
Jazz
Revising
Risk
Scripts
Singers
Timing
Conceal
Dancers
Material
Revealed
Tonality
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Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Ambivalence
Authority
Criticism
Declaring
Omniscient
Questioning
Settling
Vulnerability
Narrator
Possibilities
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You were not supposed to show off in Negroland because you are supposed to be perfectly decorous and well behaved. You were also not supposed to tell any stories that reflected badly on the group because that reflected badly on the race. I use past tense, but it still feels like present tense.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Present Tense
Tense
Badly
Behaved
Perfectly
Reflected
Show Off
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I first wrote about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. His skin was growing paler, his features thinner, and his aura more feminine. Some called him a traitor to his race. Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a post-modern shape-shifter. But the shifts grew more extreme and mysterious.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Features
Feminine
Fluidity
Mysterious
Traitor
Extreme
Aura
Michael
Jackson
Shifts
Thinner
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A Negro girl could never be purely innocent. The vengeful Race Fairy always lurked nearby; your parents' best hope was that the fairy would show up at someone else's feast and punish their child. Parents had to protect themselves, too, and protect you from knowing how much danger you all were in.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Danger
Fairy
Innocent
Vengeful
Best Hope Your
Feast
Nearby
Punish
Purely
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Depression isn't the almighty ruler of your destiny. Even its familiar traits - grief, anger, despair - you find that you can use in other ways. I can create with them in my writing and my life, mix them up with excitement and pleasure. I can name that terrible, numbing paralysis and know it will pass.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Destiny
Grief
Writing
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Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Dose
Engaging
Film Noir
Genuine
Literal
Noir
Real Work
Suspense
Work Done Feel
Attitudes
Thriller
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Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
America
Amount
Certain
Enjoyed
Glad
Plenty
Privilege
Residents
Name
Few
Small
Region
Returned
Sheltered
Warned
Whites
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I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Credit
Faults
My Generation
Predecessors
Weakness
Achievements
Discuss
Error
Expose
Notice
Received
Strangers
Secrets
Uncertainties
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I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Core
Despite
Enlightened
Giving
Thinking
White
Society Always Me
Achieved
Directly
Harmful
Passed
Presence
Whites
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There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Forbidden
Forms
Claiming
Most Important Thing
Only One Way
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I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Chicago
Childhood
Married
Pediatrician
Worker
Doctor
Branch
Nation
Full-Time
Hospital
Oldest
Throughout
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Criticism does demand a certain kind of authority, but what about the authority of not really being sure what you think? What about the authority, the authenticity that comes from bringing all your intellectual, emotional and spiritual equipment to a piece of art or entertainment whilst still being uncertain and confused?
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Authenticity
Confused
Criticism
Demand
Equipment
Spiritual
Uncertain
Bringing
Piece
Whilst
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The piece I most love wearing is Mother's gold brocade cocktail dress with matching jacket... It's 'flip and flirty,' as my mother prescribed. It's crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I've put on made-to-order armor. My mother's armor. Armor that helped shield me from exclusion. Armor that helped shield me from inferiority.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Armor
Exclusion
Flip
Gold
Inferiority
Matching
Splendid
Love Dress Me
Cocktail
Crisp
Jacket
Prescribed
Shield
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If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Creatures
Desirable
Toxic
Good-Looking
Highly
Imitate
Protestant
Upper
White Women
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My mother was not happy with the Afros that my friends and I emerged with - there's that crack in the book of 'Why, if a fly landed in there, he'd break his little wings trying to get out.' I was not pure dashiki, though - I was a combination of African dresses, miniskirts, tank tops, shawls, ethnic-looking earrings, sandals.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Break
Combination
Dresses
Pure
Wings
African
Crack
Landed
Emerged
Tank
Tops
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Clever of me to become a critic. We critics scrutinize and show off to a higher end. For a greater good. Our manners, our tastes, our declarations are welcomed. Superior for life. Except when we're not. Except when we're dismissed or denounced as envious or petty, as derivatives and dependents by nature. Second class for life.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Class
Critics
Derivatives
Envious
Greater
Greater Good
Higher
Manners
Petty
Scrutinize
Life Nature Good
Critic
Dismissed
Tastes
Except
Show Off
Superior
Welcomed
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You're supported by everything in New York if you want to be a performing artist. You come here, you can change your name. You leave home, you come here, you're severed from family obligations - the old identity drops away as soon as you come to New York because you're coming to New York, if you're an artist, to be someone else.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Performing
Drops
Obligations
Severed
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As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Clever
Color
Loud
Red
Vulgar
Crossed
Little Girl
Outfit
Signal
Skirt
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Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Belief
Privilege
Whiteness
Power Yourself People
Advance
Began
Burst
Challenge
Consider
Grown
Ideal
Major
Present
Perfectly
Privileges
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I would certainly say that my life, and perhaps human life in general, follows an intricate pattern of defining, declaring, struggling for, fighting for what we think of and treasure as the self. The inviolate self. This begins with our families: your parents are part of your cultural landscape, and they are also shaped by larger forces than them.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Declaring
Defining
Fighting
Human Life
Intricate
Landscape
Treasure
Life Fighting Your
Life Fighting My Life
Begins
Cultural
Life My Life Your
Follows
Forces
Shaped
Pattern
Perhaps
Struggling
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In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Chicago
Memoir
Racism
Upbringing
Carefully
World Black People
Curate
Fifties
Insults
Protesting
Sixties
Stereotypes
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There are still Negro elites. Many of them are obviously much richer, and perhaps a little more integrated into what remains a white power structure. But those old rituals from the social clubs, to the broadly segregated white and black schools, to an obsessive interest in ancestry, all of that does still exist. Look: we are a class-bound society.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Ancestry
Clubs
Elites
Integrated
Obsessive
Remains
Structure
Exist
Rituals
Perhaps
Power Structure
Richer
Schools
Segregated
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The world I grew up in had both a literal and mythological quality. We were on the borders of several worlds - the larger black world bordered us on one side. More distantly, there was the larger white world. We interacted with some, but not others. If you think of it as an internal geography, it is a land, a contested space with these very charged historical, cultural, and emotional borders.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Emotional
Historical
Thinking
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No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Jobs
Real
Sweet
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We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse? Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
Margo Jefferson / Critic
Believe
Children
Stars
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Margo Jefferson Quotes - Page 2

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