Witty, brooding, contemplative, explosive: take your pick. Margo Jefferson More Quotes by Margo Jefferson More Quotes From 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. Margo Jefferson place think mind memories A Negro girl could never be purely innocent. The vengeful Race Fairy always lurked nearby; your parents' best hope was that the fairy would show up at someone else's feast and punish their child. Parents had to protect themselves, too, and protect you from knowing how much danger you all were in. Margo Jefferson best you girl hope I would certainly say that my life, and perhaps human life in general, follows an intricate pattern of defining, declaring, struggling for, fighting for what we think of and treasure as the self. The inviolate self. This begins with our families: your parents are part of your cultural landscape, and they are also shaped by larger forces than them. Margo Jefferson my-life parents self life 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. Margo Jefferson childish something dislike worship Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution. Margo Jefferson beyond legal human some 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. Margo Jefferson yourself you grief memories I'm a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor. Margo Jefferson sometime admirer ongoing 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 status things way world 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. Margo Jefferson my-life me life way 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. Margo Jefferson you mother beauty people 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 fly friends mother happy 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. Margo Jefferson you conflict fashion world 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. Margo Jefferson group you race past 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 you debate black people
