6 august 2018 http://www.openthemagazine.com 49
Margo Jefferson is the author of
the National Book Critics’ Circle
Award-winning Negroland,
a memoir about growing up
as part of Chicago’s Black elite
in the 1950s and 60s. ‘I call it
Negroland because I still find the
word ‘Negro’ a word of wonders,
glorious and terrible. A word
for runaway slave posters and
civil rights proclamations; for
social constructs and street corner
flaunts,’ she writes. Her first book,
On Michael Jackson, is a contemplation on the King of Pop, whom she
describes as ‘fragile and feral, percussive and sinuous, vulnerable and
unassailable’. Jefferson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, and has worked
as a cultural critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. She is
currently professor of writing at Columbia University School of Arts. We
met in London, in advance of her appearance at the Southbank Centre.
“W
HEN I WAS a young thing,” Margo Jefferson
says, “I had certain gifts that charmed adults.
I was well spoken. I was vivacious. I was a very
good pianist. Every child is looking, don’t you think, for
certain sources of power?”
Her extraordinary memoir, Negroland, opens with a scene
where Margo, age four, at a dinner party, waits for a break in
adult conversation to announce, “Sometimes I forget to wipe
myself.” The laughter comes after a short silence, and she realises
she’s being tolerated rather than appreciated. She would have
liked to have been a child star like Shirley Temple or Freddie Bar-
tholomew, a tiny creature capable of controlling the narrative
and making everyone fall in love with them. She describes it as
“a kind of paradise of love and power, absolutely linked”.
On Michael Jackson, her monograph on the 20th century’s
greatest performer, explores this obsession for the child star.
She is both fan and critic—marvelling at his gifts of voice and
movement, his craving for superstar status, his obsession with
PT Barnum (Jackson gave members of his staff copies of
Barnum’s autobiography saying, “I
want my career to be the greatest show
on earth”). She talks about his role as a
shape-shifter; the phenomenal ward-
robe choices—a template upon which
feminine, masculine and gender queer
fantasy is thrown; the little Black boy
who plays with all the tropes of the Black
hetero body, veering away from it as he
grows into that Black male body, fol-
lowing certain feminine modes until he
becomes a new species altogether.
But she also addresses his failed
public-relations stunts, the surgeries, the
allegations of sexual abuse, the skin disease, the drug-induced
death, the inability to acknowledge his transcendence of race,
gender, sexuality. “He chose not to, or could not find a language
which we are all trying to find to document, or at least declare
in a sense, ‘This is my manifesto’—‘I am going beyond!’ And he
never did that,” she says. “He always behaved as if he were an
innocent child and everyone else was wrong to be startled. So
he’s an interesting object lesson in how to take control of the
language around these transformations.”
At 70, Jefferson has the body of a dancer—lithe, upright. We
sit on a terrace in her London hotel. She is animated and engaged,
speaking across tones and octaves, ranging from loud exclama-
tions, peals of laughter and hushed whispers. When I tell her I
grieve for Patrick Swayze in the pure way she grieves for Michael
Jackson, she understands. “Let’s go back and forth on this,” she
says, dismantling why these icons represent our deepest longings
and elected affinities. She talks about how we construct narra-
tives with our icons—narratives we are free to enter at any stage,
where we’re always safe. How in the real world, our longings and
expressions always have a price, but there is no price if those long-
ings are lived out by Michael or Patrick. How in the end, it has to
do with their gifts, their virtuosities. How all of us long to be able
to use our bodies and voices in ways that conquer and allure.
It’s interesting how even when Jefferson is speaking of love,
the word ‘conquer’ shows up. Power as immutable, power to
exclude and include, power as it intersects with race and gen-
der. Writing Negroland must have been a shift in vulnerability,
I ask; to relinquish the power of the critic and move into that
dangerous territory of the personal?
“There was a real terror,” Jefferson says, “I knew I’d have to do
things I hadn’t done before technically—dialogue, confession,
certain kinds of dramatic narrative, but the vulnerability prob-
lem was huge. That had to do with being a critic, but also with the
Negroland I’d grown up in, where you didn’t reveal anything that
might be turned against you—failure, weakness, damage, etcet-
era. Once I discovered I could code the fact of that background,
which in a sense was training me to write anything but memoir, I
could put that into the confessional vulnerable material.”
Negroland is a cultural memoir—part collage, part personal,
part black bourgeoisie history. Jefferson
wanted to use the word ‘Negro’ because
she wanted it to be a marker of a historical
and emotional period—the 50s and 60s
she grew up in, where ‘Negro’ was the
preferred word. This was the civil rights
movement world, where people like Lor-
raine Hansberry and Martin Luther King
were talking about the Negro people with
a capital ‘N’. “Names shift and change,
they have enormous meaning, they are
metaphorical, they are literal, they are
reflections of what people are trying to
say about themselves and what others are“I combined Negro
with land because
all Negroes live in
our land of history, of
discrimination, of struggle,
of achievement—a worldwithin that world”
margo jeffersonBy Tishani Doshi