Margo Jefferson, do you know who she is?
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995 for her book reviews and cultural analyses in The New York Times. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) in 2016 for Negroland a memoir which was also short-listed that year for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, an annual British prize for the best non-fiction in the English language. And this year, 2022, She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. (After reading the book, I googled her, a little research before writing the review. And all I've got to say about these honors is that I am impressed with the organizations. They had the great good sense to recognize and reward her work.)
How did I find out about this book? Since I seldom read reviews before I read the book or watch the movie or listen to the music. My daughter recommended it. While attending a writing program at Skidmore several years ago, my daughter heard Ms. Jefferson read a passage and thought I'd enjoy it. It didn't hurt a bit that one of the blurbs on the dust jacket is from Isabel Wilkerson, an historian whose work I very much admire. My daughter was right.
Okay, so you've read Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming -- if you haven't, do yourself a favor and read it. You can get it free from your local public library. And read my January 14, 2019 blog post reviewing it. (It's available in my blog's archives. Also free.)
They grew up in the same city, Chicago -- our Michelle and Margo -- but a generation apart. Both are African American. Both are intelligent, well-educated women. And both have achieved great success. Dispite this common ground, I think you'll find Margo Jefferson and Michelle Obama to be as different as a Live Oak and a Coastal Redwood, both beautiful and hardy enough to not only survive but thrive in this hostile world. .
Michelle Obama grew up in a working class neighborhood amid a close, extended family. She attended neighborhood schools and was encouraged to get the best education possible.
Margo Jefferson grew up in a wealthy, highly educated family, her father a doctor and her mother a social worker. They lived in an upper class, becoming integrated, neighborhood. They had famous people from the sciences to the arts as guests in their home. Her parents had a cabin cruiser docked on Lake Michigan. She describes themselves as "The Third Race ... poised between the masses of Negros and all classes of Caucasians. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity." They were the Negro Elite.
Growing up white in Oklahoma at the same time Ms. Jefferson was growing up in Chicago, I knew nothing of The Negro Elite.
Obama's growing-up world was very like my own and that of my family and friends. I was the daughter of an electrician. My friends included the daughter of Cuban refugees (they had been wealthy and influential before Castro took over), the daughter of an art teacher at the local college (he may have been a professor, that was before I was familiar with academic ranks), the daughter of a highway construction crew boss, and the daughter of the local veterinarian (actually, he got his DVM at the University of Pennsylvania. Who knew that was, and is, an Ivy League school?) The son of a former Governor/US Senator was in my typing class, but I doubt he knew my name. To be honest, I knew nothing of The White Elite.
The one thing Margo Jefferson and I had in common was learning about the world through literature. All kinds of literature -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism and all their various permutations. During her sophomore year in highschool, she was introduced to the essay, "challenging essays -- by E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and James Baldwin."
Jefferson describes the first time she read Baldwin. She quotes from Notes of a Native Son, "Many Thousands Gone."
The story of the Negro in America is the story of America--or, more precisely it is the story
of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. [The
Negro in America] is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we
helplessly battle."
At that young age, she began her life of critical analyses of the Word. "Who is this 'We'?" she asks. And answers, "It's you, white readers. But what of We, his smaller band of Negro readers? ...the Negro that so many Negroes like me dread having plural relations with."
Back to Baldwin, she quotes him "One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds."
Then she says "'One': a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than 'we.' An 'I' made ubiquitous. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation."
She, that highschool sophomore, continues,
"Close the book. (Breathe deeply.) James Baldwin is proclaiming right of entry with
every possessive pronoun, integrating America by means of grammar and syntax. No
demonstrators hosed into the air and crashing onto pavements, no tear-gassed bodies
coughing and twisting, no children our age dressed in exhaustively clean, pressed clothes
to walk shielded by armed guards into schools built to deny them."
You know how some times you are moved by the perfect, most beautifully honest music or painting or movie or a play that gets life so right you see the world differently. I think that's what the best art forms done well do. The artform that has the strongest effect on me is the written word in my language, English. As I read, the words are experienced inside of me, not on a stage or screen across the room. Strong words, direct words put together in ways I'd never thought about, explode in my head, sunbursts glinting off shards of old understandings scattering into the darkness of the past.
In Negroland a memoir, Margo Jefferson did that for me. Over and over in its pages. It is the best memoir I've ever read.
