“Thrum go the materials of my life,” writes Margo Jefferson at the start of this original and moving memoir. But how to assemble them? “Chosen, imposed, inherited, made up,” they include her own “temperamental autobiography”, the lyrics and sweat of Ella Fitzgerald, the words of Willa Cather, the dangerous lure of Ike Turner, the “unsanctioned notes and chords” of Bud Powell, the charisma and swagger of Josephine Baker, the singular bodies and voices of James Baldwin and Sammy Davis Jr and many, many more. Jefferson refuses a stable bulwark with a “fixed edifice” and, instead, imagines a nervous system, a living, complex architecture that is intertextual, fragmentary, poetic, polyphonic, deciphering what these artists have meant not just to her own personal history but to an emerging consciousness of race and class in the US. The words of others, she writes, “hold the past”.
Born in Chicago in 1947, Jefferson was raised in an upper middle class black family. Her father, a paediatrician, felt he, and they, had to be exemplary because of their privileged social position and race. But he struggled, closed himself off, wept when reciting to his children the exclusions and injustices he’d witnessed. Jefferson considers his irreproachable daily life as a professional, a colleague, a father, a friend “after a lifetime of racist incidents and intrusions”. Years later when she reads words written by the civil rights leader Ida B Wells – If it were possible, [I]would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them – she thinks they could have been written for her father.
Jefferson, who has won a Pulitzer Prize for her book reviews and other cultural criticism, has written about music, art, books and theatre for almost 50 years. Her critique of black artists recognises the double consciousness of their experience, being seen through others’ eyes, and her own critical work imagining and interpreting those texts that have failed to imagine her.
Her homage to Ella Fitzgerald is singularly beautiful. Fitzgerald lost her mother when she was 15 and was sentenced to a reform school. A year later she escaped, returned to Harlem, and at age 21 had a number one hit record with A-Tisket, A-Tasket. “From her mother’s love untimely ripped, she tucks an elegy into a nursery rhyme,” writes Jefferson. Fitzgerald never talked about her past. “She will refuse our scrutiny and our pity.” But her body is scrutinised. She was deemed “too ugly...portly”. She sweats, something white women never do on television, her body threatening to drag her back as she “swings, scats and soars”. But for 58 years Fitzgerald performed, cupping her hand to her ear “so as to hear herself at work”. Throughout the memoir Jefferson addresses the artists that make up the “materials” of her life: “you turned the maw of black female labor into the wonderland of black female art,” she tells Fitzgerald.
This is visceral criticism, tactile, real and meaningful.
