Margo Jefferson is one of the boldest cultural critics of the past 50 years. But writing memoir is her true act of defiance. JasMoneyRecords reports on the writer and her new book, which recounts her life through a web of influences
Photo: Rog & Bee Walker She’s composed and imposing,” says Margo Jefferson. We’re gazing at a painting in “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” a one-room installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that takes the history of Seneca Village — a community of free Blacks who thrived in Manhattan during the 19th century — and flings it into the Afrofuture, conjoining and collapsing time altogether. On this day, Jefferson is lithe in draped layers, a thin scarf around her neck.
On the page, her sentences are balletic. They do not sweat. “I was taught to avoid showing off,” she begins her 2015 memoir, Negroland. Yet she tells me that politesse, ingrained by her “haute bourgeoisie” upbringing, was a habit she sought to shake. “There was a certain well-behaved manner even when I was arguing, standing firm, that I didn’t want to stay in thrall to.
Margo was born in Chicago in 1947, younger sister to Denise. Their mother, Irma, was a homemaker and society woman. Their father, Dr. Ronald Jefferson, was head of pediatrics at Provident, a Black hospital on the city’s South Side. Theirs was a world of firsts and onlys. The girls attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Margo went on to Brandeis, then Columbia.
Among the book’s prevalent themes is Jefferson’s reality as an “adult orphan.” Her father died in the ’90s. Then, in 2010, her sister died from ovarian cancer. This premature death imbued Jefferson with a sense of urgency, an awareness of time’s frailty; it was the event that hastened her need to document her upbringing in the fear that the particular milieu was disappearing. Before Jefferson could publish Negroland, her mother died too.
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