Margo Jefferson

“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.”

“Ralph Ellison's essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.”

“All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.”

“As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.”

“Giving in to your ego is one of the oldest stories in the showbiz book. But so is figuring out how to stay vivid.”

“If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. 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.”

“In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.”

“Many say that no real avant-garde - which I'll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists - can exist anymore. The media's reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly.”

“New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.”

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

“The piece I most love wearing is Mother's gold brocade cocktail dress with matching jacket... It's 'flip and flirty,' as my mother prescribed. It's crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I've put on made-to-order armor. My mother's armor. Armor that helped shield me from exclusion. Armor that helped shield me from inferiority.”

“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.”

“I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.”