Margo Jefferson Quotes
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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.
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Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In general, fashion is decorative, it's protective, it acknowledges that the world does involve conflict, and you might be attacked by assumptions, presumptions, and attitudes.
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I do not regret the years I spent reading the traditional canon of white male writers in school. I do regret reading so little else there: Austen, George Eliot and occasionally Woolf, likewise Wright, Ellison, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
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When people start reconfiguring marriage, there's no going back.
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The burden of being a constant symbol, of having to live up to a symbol of advancement, of progress, of being perfect in some way and always representing the destiny of an entire people - that is supposed to be invincibility. That's enormous.
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I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
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Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise.
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So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
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Michael Jackson was one of popular culture's greatest artists. Nobody danced better. Few sang more compellingly. No one understood more about stage spectacles or music videos. He was an innovator. His reach was global.
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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.
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Several elementary school teachers had described me as a 'future authoress or poetess.' Mother took me to meet Chicago's leading black librarian, who published a poem of mine in the magazine she edited for Negro children.
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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.
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New Yorkers know how to borrow wildly. You know, Louis Armstrong was not a New York musician. He went from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and when he arrived here, he taught those New Yorkers. New York needs that infusion.
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When innovations become habits, prescriptions, they must be imagined all over again, made new.
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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.
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Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.
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Self-examination - when the whole world around you is pressuring that and challenging you - is very, very hard. Looking at a whole structure - in my case, let us say of snobbery, basking in certain privileges, marks of what appear to be superiority - that's ugly to look at.
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Giving in to your ego is one of the oldest stories in the showbiz book. But so is figuring out how to stay vivid.
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I'm always aware of various audiences, as a part of my training as a journalist and as part of my training as a citizen of Negroland.