Margo's Way

She’s one of the boldest cultural critics of the past 50 years. But writing memoir is Margo Jefferson’s true act of defiance.

- Jasmine Sanders

She’s composed and imposing,” says Margo Jefferson. We’re gazing at a painting in “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” a one-room installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that takes the history of Seneca Village—a community of free Blacks who thrived in Manhattan during the 19th century—and flings it into the Afrofuture, conjoining and collapsing time altogether. On this day, Jefferson is lithe in draped layers, a thin scarf around her neck. Her hair is cropped, her blonde curls impeccably toned; her hands swan through the air as she speaks. Before us is Henry Taylor’s large-scale portrait of Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first female deep-sea diver in the U.S. Army. There is evidence of staging in Crabtree’s ramrod pose, her orderly, unthreatening ’fro, her carmine painted mouth. Hers is the practiced, stolid ladyhood requisite for all Black mavens, all defiers of the limitations imposed upon their race and sex. She wears her diving suit. She holds her helmet on her knee. “She looks impermeable—but you know she’s not,” says Jefferson.

It’s a summation typical of the Jeffersonian critical manner. This month, the writer publishes her second memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, an exploration of the self as told through the lives of Jefferson’s late sister, Denise; artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Ike Turner; and literary figures such as Willa Cather and the character Topsy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book is a double helix of personal history and critique—a work built on the nearly half-century Jefferson has spent as a critic of American culture, writing on traditions from minstrelsy to contemporary theater, literature, and music, buttressed by racial pathos all. She published her first essay, “Ripping Off Black Music,” in