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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
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. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
Melancholy’ is prettier than ‘depression’; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered. Margo Jefferson Read Quote
