Top 40 Margo Jefferson Quotes

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.

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.

I resist lists. It must be all those ‘Most Important’ and ‘Best of the Year’ ones I compiled in my years as a beat critic. I often felt guilty about what I left out.

I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.

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.

What’s often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.

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.

Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote for.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won’t hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

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.

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.

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.

New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of ‘golden ages’ to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.

Ralph Ellison’s essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.

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.

I was born in 1947, and 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.

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.

Many say that no real avant-garde – which I’ll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists – can exist anymore. The media’s reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly.

At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality – moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Jackson loved epic symbols. In his shows and his videos, he always destroyed or salvaged worlds; he was the hero of parables about street violence, sexual combat, war and natural disaster. It was always apocalypse or apotheosis now.

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.

Fashion for my mother was about asserting and demonstrating you had aesthetics, tastes, sensibility, manners, beauty – qualities that black people were always trying to prove they possessed, because it was often assumed that we didn’t.

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.

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.

All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.

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.

I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.

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.

For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to ‘perform’ rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.

Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.

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.

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.

I was nearing the end of childhood when I started to pay real attention to jazz singers. Women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the men. Black women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the whites.

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.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

Yes, for blacks, racism functions without the actual presence of whites, just as for whites it functions without the actual presence of blacks! Beliefs, conventions, history do the work.

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.