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.
— Margo Jefferson
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.
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.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
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.
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.
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'm a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.
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.
When people start reconfiguring marriage, there's no going back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The burden of being a constant symbol, of having to live up to a symbol of advancement, of progress, of being perfect in some way and always representing the destiny of an entire people - that is supposed to be invincibility. That's enormous.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience.
Privilege is provisional. It can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn.
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.
There are still Negro elites. Many of them are obviously much richer, and perhaps a little more integrated into what remains a white power structure. But those old rituals from the social clubs, to the broadly segregated white and black schools, to an obsessive interest in ancestry, all of that does still exist. Look: we are a class-bound society.
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.
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.
The world itself is so full of changes - of negotiations, changes of position, seeing things one way, then another, gauging responses, status changes that can happen in an instant.
