With Columbia Journalism School friends in New York in the seventies. All photographs courtesy of Margo Jefferson.

Margo Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947, to Irma and Ronald Jefferson, two members of what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as the Talented Tenth, or the Black leadership class. Irma, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a Delta Sigma Theta, had trained as a social worker but left the workforce for society life after she married Ronald, who became the head of pediatrics at Provident, the first Black-run hospital in the United States. The Jefferson girls⁠—Margo, a pianist, and her elder sister, Denise, a dancer⁠—attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools from elementary school through twelfth grade and were sent to arts programs in the summers. Denise went to Wheaton and Margo to Brandeis, where she graduated cum laude in English and American literature. “For my generation,” Jefferson writes in her 2015 memoir, Negroland, “the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.”

Jefferson’s first writing job, after graduating from Columbia Journalism School, was as an associate editor at Newsweek, where she was the first Black book reviewer and the first female one. In 1979 she began teaching in the journalism department at NYU, and in 1991 became a lecturer at Columbia; she is now on the faculty of Columbia’s School of the Arts. In 1993, she joined the New York Times as a critic on the culture desk, winning the Pulitzer in 1995 for writing “forcefully and originally without ever muscling out the author in question.” That year, she became the Sunday theater critic; from 1996 to 2006, as a critic at large, she mused one week on Virginia Woolf or Langston Hughes and the next on Judy Garland or Oprah Winfrey. 

“We’re still inclined to believe that critical authority comes mostly from assertion or virtuoso displays of intellectual mastery,” she wrote in one column, in 2000. “What about intelligent questions asked forthrightly? What about admitting sometimes that we’re not sure we’re asking all that needs to be asked? And what about ambivalence?” Her first book, On Michael Jackson (2006), was an illustration of this approach, a meditation on the artist that drew on her interests in the performances of race, gender, and sexuality, the psychodynamics of the nuclear family, and the complicity of the audience in child stardom. 

Negroland was a departure for Jefferson⁠—a hybrid work of history, criticism, and memoir about her upbringing in the Black elite, in which she dares to speak outside the family. “Children always find ways to subvert while they’re busy complying,” she writes. “This child’s method of subversion? … She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.” The book, which is dedicated to Denise, who died in 2010 and was the longtime director of the Ailey School, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Constructing a Nervous System (2022) is equally inventive, a dramatic monologue in which the narrator adapts popular songs to her purposes; remembers her father’s “recitatif of racial injuries and exclusions”; analyzes the performances of Ella Fitzgerald and Bud Powell; and delivers an imagined lecture on Willa Cather, just one of the artists whose work both “enchants and erases” her.  

Jefferson and I met several times in the course of a little less than a year to talk about her career. Our first conversation took place in front of a small audience hosted by the Review; after that, we met in a café near her home in Greenwich Village. At each meeting, she was characteristically witty and focused, and⁠—rare these days⁠—listened as artfully as she talked. In the last of our sessions, she recalled one of our early encounters, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, where we were visiting a beloved mutual friend, the writer and editor Christopher Cox, who perished from AIDS in 1990. I had forgotten about that day, perhaps needed to forget it, but as Jefferson re-created the scene for me, I remembered other things, and was reminded, too, of her devotion to bearing delicate and critical witness to the process of remaking the past. 

INTERVIEWER

I feel that I was reading about your world before I met you. My mother once brought home Gerri Major’s Black Society. It had a gold cover.

MARGO JEFFERSON

Rife with self-congratulating on every page, right?

INTERVIEWER

It talked about things like musicales and coming-out parties. I remember distinctly that it was a Johnson publication. Did your family have it, too? 

JEFFERSON

I ordered that book⁠—along with more books about the Black elite than I’d ever known existed⁠—for the second and third chapters of Negroland. Some of them I’d grown up with, but my mother might have considered Gerri’s an etiquette book, really, and I’m not sure we had those at home. I think my mother wouldn’t have felt she needed them. That sounds a little snobbish, and it was. We did subscribe to Ebony. And the Johnsons, who published Ebony as well as Gerri Major’s book, were friends of my parents’ and part of our Chicago world. 

INTERVIEWER

What was it like to grow up in this Black society you call Negroland, and what did you have to hide from it?

JEFFERSON

Well, there were several layers of hiding, from the profound to the very superficial. To start with the superficial, it had to do with modes of behavior that were not going to give off a whiff of those distasteful stereotypes about rough and wild Negro girls and rough and wild and crude Negro women. 

INTERVIEWER

It’s like that moment in The Bluest Eye when Geraldine thinks, I’ve seen that little girl all my life, hanging out of windows, crawling over porches, sitting in bus stations holding paper bags. 

JEFFERSON

And wearing nail polish your mother thinks is too red. Exactly. And then there are diction lessons and, within diction, the question of speaking loudly versus not. There’s a whole code of manners and mannerisms. You have to be vivacious enough to be good company and to dance well at parties, but you can’t cross the line into a coarser vivacity. So the superficial part requires a lot of manipulation and quick turns. My mother, Denise, and I would be in an elevator at Marshall Field’s, and Denise would say something and we’d both start to crack up, and my mother would want to laugh but would say, “If you don’t straighten up yourselves and your backs by the time this elevator door opens …”

Now, on a deeper level, the struggle was with how to excel. You were certainly supposed to do well in school, but if doing well demanded that you be a little too original or daring, that might be a problem, might violate the codes of perfect Negrodom. So how could you make yourself known? What did that require? By “making yourself known,” I mean being able to comment⁠—having opinions that matter. Reading James Baldwin was, in that way, sort of extraordinary for me, because he had opinions that mattered and he knew it, and I absolutely longed for that⁠—which was not the same thing as being told, “You write well.”

INTERVIEWER

Who told you that you wrote well?

Second from left, with Denise, her mother, and a friend (at left) in Chicago, ca. 1955.

JEFFERSON

A teacher of mine, Miss Torrance, who had a short Doris Day haircut and carried herself in an interesting way, wrote on my report card, when I was in fifth grade, “In Margo we have a poetess.” And I was always being told, by my white schoolteachers, how well I read. This was a private school, but they decided on admitting a certain number of Blacks each year so there was no unpleasantness. I was always reading. Irma had studied literature and had worked, in college, for Charlemae [Hill] Rollins, who stocked one of Chicago’s Black libraries with major works for children, and she read to us constantly⁠—in that way she was quite adorable. She and I would try to memorize all the poems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and recite them in the car. All the books in the house were hers. I remember, for some reason, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, and later, when Denise got into French, there was Balzac. 

At some point, my mother sent a poem of mine in to a magazine for Black students, and they published the poem. Which I do not have anymore. I believe it was about the seasons in some way. But I wasn’t clear on what I’d be. Piano was supposed to be my real gift, although I didn’t love it the way Denise loved dance. Denise was allowed to be described as a talented dancer. 

With Denise in Boston, ca. 1956.

INTERVIEWER

Why “allowed”?

JEFFERSON

I mean that my sister and I were allowed to evade certain parts of the code, because while our parents had quashed artistic ambitions within themselves, they still nurtured them in us. They’d gone to high school with this or that musician, and they were big theatergoers⁠—they loved to go to New York for jazz and theater⁠—so that was one of the legacies they passed on. Denise, who was, from childhood on, full of action, very willful, would say, “We’re going to move to New York. We’re going to be artists.” And certain parts of our parents needed for us to act up and act out⁠—because they had behaved so very, very well. My father was a doctor but he’d been interested in being a professional trombonist. Nana, my grandmother, told him that the men in our family were either doctors or lawyers. Nana was a darling, but this simply wasn’t true. Her husband had been a carpenter and a builder. As with all American social climbing of whatever race, history gets remade and rewritten very, very quickly.

INTERVIEWER

Once you have the arrival myth, it doesn’t matter how you got there.

JEFFERSON

Or it does, but the point is the maintenance of this implacably correct world. Now, within that, you could be naughty and give dinner parties where some woman would descend from the ceiling in a basket and everybody would have a great time. There’s that kind of upper-middle-class wantonness. We can do what we want when the world is ours.