Quotes from Margo Jefferson

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

I was nearing the end of childhood when I started to pay real attention to jazz singers. Women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the men. Black women excelled as jazz singers; they surpassed most of the whites.

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.

Several elementary school teachers had described me as a 'future authoress or poetess.' Mother took me to meet Chicago's leading black librarian, who published a poem of mine in the magazine she edited for Negro children.

New Yorkers know how to borrow wildly. You know, Louis Armstrong was not a New York musician. He went from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and when he arrived here, he taught those New Yorkers. New York needs that infusion.

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 resist lists. It must be all those 'Most Important' and 'Best of the Year' ones I compiled in my years as a beat critic. I often felt guilty about what I left out.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.

Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.

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.

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.

Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.

My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write.

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.

Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.

My individual way of taking on the burdens of history has changed. I don't think of them only as burdens; I think they are honorable.

Michael Jackson loved epic symbols. In his shows and his videos, he always destroyed or salvaged worlds; he was the hero of parables about street violence, sexual combat, war and natural disaster. It was always apocalypse or apotheosis now.

We Americans are childish about our celebrities and icons. We worship, then we denounce; we identify passionately with them and then, if they do something - anything - we dislike, we cast them off.

I do not regret the years I spent reading the traditional canon of white male writers in school. I do regret reading so little else there: Austen, George Eliot and occasionally Woolf, likewise Wright, Ellison, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.

My parents always told my sister and me that if we wanted to, we could be doctors and lawyers, like my father and his brothers, like some of their women friends. Denise and I had art in our sights, though.

When innovations become habits, prescriptions, they must be imagined all over again, made new.

I first wrote about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. His skin was growing paler, his features thinner, and his aura more feminine. Some called him a traitor to his race. Some fussed about his gender fluidity. I saw him as a post-modern shape-shifter. But the shifts grew more extreme and mysterious.

Yes, for blacks, racism functions without the actual presence of whites, just as for whites it functions without the actual presence of blacks! Beliefs, conventions, history do the work.