Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson

Remember: Memoir is your present negotiating with versions of your past for a future you’re willing to show up in.

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I had no idea who Margo Jefferson was and why she would be writing a memoir but now I do. She is a professor, an author, a journalist and a critic of American culture and constructing a Nervous System has it all in it. It is a book you need to concentrate on rather than read as you are falling asleep each night.

Jefferson hops from thought to thought, leaping around her memories, settling on cultural role models encountered throughout her life but all the time circling around colour, privilege and class.

I loved it when she settled on Ella Fitzgerald, the singer who was seen as overweight and sweaty, by describing her as she sings A-Tisket, A-Tasket.

But on television white women singers do not ever sweat and they barely perspire. Ella Fitzgerald does both. Which means that, even as she swings, scats and soars, Ella Fitzgerald’s sweat threatens to drag her back into the maw of working-class black female labor.

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Jefferson runs through the words of the song which on the surface seem quite innocuous until you know something of Fitzgerald. In the 19th century version of the song the basket is green and yellow but in Ella’s it’s brown and yellow. And so it goes on. It is fantastic.

But it isn’t just black women that work as roles, there is also Bing Crosby.

Everybody needs a minstrel man and black women like me have finally won the right to ours.

Oprah had Dr Phil.

Condi had George Bush.

I have Bing Crosby.

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To be a minstrel they have to behave in a way that she never could because of the family values and upbringing but also can’t help wondering what would happen if she did behave like that. Jefferson is piercing in her critique of Crosby because he is entitled to everything and can get away with anything.

Ike Turner gets a special section all to himself!

And there are many more, from further back and from the present day.

The nervous system Jefferson constructs is I think the links between herself and culture – literature and music – in the little snippets where she sees a role model and also the gaps where she doesn’t. She articulates so well what it is to be a black woman and in a form of memoir all her own.

The writing consists of quotes, quotes with words crossed out and replaced by Jefferson’s, mini chapters, deep-diving, critiquing her own writing, thinking and teaching. It really is remarkable.

Surely all this drove you to imagine and interpret what had not imagined you.

I’ve had to do the same.

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