A Conversation with
Margo Jefferson

Yes, indeed. First level, memoir certainly suggests personal. Negroland is clearly — however else a reader is interpreting it — a larger, group space and place. It's a cultural memoir. The personal and the cultural are constantly collaborating but fighting each other. That means the form is doing the same. I also chose, clearly, a contested word: negro. I wanted it to signify a very particular historical time. Negro used to be the word of choice, very much the word our parents and grandparents used as a sign of respect and dignity.

I went official with it when I applied for a Guggenheim with this as a proposal and got it in 2008. Other things intervened. I was working full-time. Life has its own complications. But that was my main project from then on. I had started publishing little excerpts from it probably by 2010. I had aired portions of it in a couple of theater pieces I'd done in 2002, but then they lay nascent. That gave the first sense of — wait a minute. This I can go public with.

It was to document and reimagine, therefore reinvent, a world that does not advertise itself yet has only wanted respectful attention, but is therefore very little known. I wanted a varied point of view. I'm a chronicler. I'm a dissenter. I'm an admirer. I'm a critic. I'm an exile. I'm a member. I wanted to use all my writer's tools to bring that world and all its complications and contradictions to life. To do that meant also bringing a complicated social and cultural landscape. I really wanted to get at the intricacies of how power and privilege are so conditioning but also conditional. We are in the center of the party but we're also on the side. We can be very privileged. We can be exiled and looked down upon at any minute.

I found that more in fiction and memoir. The books that probably mattered most to me were Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novels, Quicksand and Passing, and Adrienne Kennedy, the playwright's plays and memoir, People Who Led to My Plays. They really got inside. They were doing the psychic life as well as the social.

It's a kind of a Holy Trinity. It would be education, a certain amount of respectable economic security — but not without education, which is why it would come first — and achievement, which is both professional and social. That you move with dignity through the world. Your behavior countered stereotypes of how negroes acted and spoke.

Looked at as more desirable, in every way. Quite literally desirable in terms of your looks, and if you were a woman, your marketability, but also culturally desirable. Men always had more room. You could look Mexican or Latin American. You could look Mediterranean. But none of those are looking Sub-Saharan African. You were not to look Sub-Saharan African. If you had to, you had to. But you had to then compensate by your achievements and other things, your manners and education. You had to excel in other ways to compensate.

In those days, it was huge because we were just starting to appear on these shows. People of color were appearing in these glamorous, popular shows — appearing to the entire nation. They were our stars moving as we were moving into this larger white world. It was incredibly exciting. They were very talented, but it was nerve-wracking too because we were always asking ourselves: how will they be presented? Will they be asked to sing something or make a joke that's belittling? It was a triumph when Nat King Cole got his own television show. Once again, it was the race. "The race is moving forward," we would tell ourselves.

The real sense of it came in the sixties from the larger world — Civil Rights, Black Power, the Women's Movement, the New Left. They all made, internally as well as externally, so many things possible. Rebellion, taking yourself apart and thinking of new ways to be. That was the way of the world and it was wonderful. I feel incredibly blessed to have been coming of age during that time, to have been stimulated and allowed to remake myself in certain ways because of that.

The first thing I was aware of was my tendency — the way I was brought up, and black history has so functioned — the chronicle of firsts and seconds. Who was the first person to do this? The first black and the first black woman to receive a Pulitzer at the time was Isabel Wilkerson, who had gotten it a couple of years before I did. I remember being very quickly aware: I'm early in the lineage and I'm part of what can become a line. It then becomes personal. It's how you cope as a writer with the rewards and prizes, handling your nervousness, your stage fright, anxiety, and all of that.

Oh, I loved it. I was very excited by it. I was at Columbia Journalism School in 1970 to 1971. Some of the new journalists were coming to speak to us. I became a critic which was a more traditional choice in some ways. But I was excited about all the literary possibilities — voice, tone, all those things they unleash. I was so very excited about essayists like Baldwin, of course, and Mailer, and Mark McCarthy. I was reading all of that and thinking: what can I do? I think all of that helped push me towards wanting to not only stay within the beat but to roam through the culture at large.

You know, I can't answer that. It changes day by day. A good writing day is fabulous. Some incredible political move or change can be extraordinary. Something delicious in my private life like going to see some fabulous piece of art. They're all part of what gives one a life and gives one happiness. But like the book, I have a lot of mood chips. A good day of writing always counts but not alone — not without those other things and a sense of the world moving and shifting. Especially that you love and are loved by people you've chosen to be part of your world.

Like most writers, I am thinking and kind of dream spacing about what the next project will be. I've got a few possibilities but I don't know yet. I want to move further and experiment more rather than just follow a very straight line from what I did. Try more, be more varied. See where the voices lead me.