Quotes from Margo Jefferson

Children always find ways to subvert while they're busy complying. This child's method of subversion? She would achieve success, but she would treat it like a concession she'd been forced to make. For unto whomsoever much is given, of her shall be much required. She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.

An acting teacher friend of mine readies her students for auditions by telling them to imagine placing all the techniques and tools they've acquired into a barrel, and put it on like rodeo clowns do. Not to be glanced at or checked on anxiously, but to be with you and at the ready when the audition demands.

Being agreeable' is the highest duty of any human being mingling with other people….Practicing good manners should be as natural as displaying the teeth").

If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon… White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

too, rolled and

Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We

Cyprian Clamorgan ends

The fashion and beauty complex has so many ways to enchant and maim.

the elite of our people" had, in his quiet way, escaped slavery. In 1841 Joseph Willson, dentist, of Philadelphia, published Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society. He used the pseudonym

It's so easy for a child to feel all wrong in the eyes of adults. And when you have no idea that what you were doing is wrong… I hated being caught unawares. It was so dangerous, so shameful not to know what I needed to know.

The intensities of friendship suit you better.

Elbow grease" is not a metaphor.

We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.

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.

Criticism does demand a certain kind of authority, but what about the authority of not really being sure what you think?

Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline

Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.

The human psyche is pathetic," I say—I declaim—to my psychopharmacologist. "It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.

There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what? So what? Go on.

mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people's enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much. Let me say with care that the blame is not symmetrical: my enemies forced my loved ones to ask too much of me.

I know that I was often tired or in pain, but you just work through it.