“I wanted to make my way to the center of American culture and find ways to decenter it,” she has said - and she did, winning a Pulitzer Prize as a New York Times critic in 1995 and writing the book On Michael Jackson in 2006 before turning to memoir. Chuck Berry, unfortunately, was a nigger.” Jefferson was 26 years old. He sang like a nigger, danced like a nigger, walked like a nigger, and talked like a nigger. The opening shot: “Elvis Presley was the greatest minstrel America ever spawned, and he appeared in bold whiteface. She published her first essay, “Ripping Off Black Music,” in Harper’s in 1973. 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. 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. It’s a summation typical of the Jeffersonian critical manner.

“She looks impermeable - but you know she’s not,” says Jefferson. Hers is the practiced, stolid ladyhood requisite for all Black mavens, all defiers of the limitations imposed upon their race and sex.

There is evidence of staging in Crabtree’s ramrod pose, her orderly, unthreatening ’fro, her carmine-painted mouth. Before us is Henry Taylor’s large-scale portrait of Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first female deep-sea diver in the U.S. Her hair is cropped, her blonde curls impeccably toned her hands swan through the air as she speaks. On this day, Jefferson is lithe in draped layers, a thin scarf around her neck. 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. She’s composed and imposing,” says Margo Jefferson.

Negroland review