Margo Jefferson Quotes
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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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Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.
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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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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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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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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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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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What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.
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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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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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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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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.
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I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.
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My individual way of taking on the burdens of history has changed. I don't think of them only as burdens; I think they are honorable.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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My parents always told my sister and me that if we wanted to, we could be doctors and lawyers, like my father and his brothers, like some of their women friends. Denise and I had art in our sights, though.
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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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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.
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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.