What the World Demands of You: The Millions Interviews Margo Jefferson

I meet Margo Jefferson for breakfast at her hotel in Boulder, Colorado, where she’s speaking at a literary conference. She’s energetic in both her speech and movement, gesturing, reaching, illustrating with her hands—artifacts, I think, of her years immersed in theatre, where her criticism earned her a Pulitzer.

After our interview, I watched her at various panels during the conference and even in the face of confusing questions, she was smiling, gracious, witty as she discussed her upbringing and Negroland, her 2015 memoir of life in 1950s and 1960s America within upper-class black society.

We spoke about that book, its implications within today’s political context, her advice for young women of color, and what she’s working on now.

The Millions: Negroland is a cultural memoir. I had the feeling in reading it that you’re quite strategic in the places and times that you show us your emotions and motivations versus the times that you present yourself quite objectively, even clinically. How did you go about making these choices?

Margo Jefferson: It was a big breakthrough for me working on it, when I realized that certain ways in which I was brought up—always presenting a certain strategically composed self—and the fact that these things were sometimes competing, and sometimes collaborating. I had to both write about it and embed those contradictions in the writing.

Also, I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that