Amy Cohen:
Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us tonight. My name is Amy Cohen and I am a member of the class of 1985 and also a member of the alumni board. And I'm also proud to say that I, along with Talee Potter, Class of '97... Class of '97, are the co-chairs of the Brandeis Women's Network. I am hoping by now most of you know what the Brandeis Women's Network is. For the very few who don't: we are a relatively new organization founded in the summer of 2019. Our mission is simple, to foster and build connections between Brandeis women.
Amy Cohen:
Since our founding, our network has seen tremendous growth. We currently have an engaged Facebook group of over 1600 members as well as a LinkedIn page. We are thrilled to be able to offer programming such as this with Margo Jefferson, and please be sure to check your email and social media for invitations to our upcoming programs. And if you haven't yet RSVPed to our workshop with Ellen Cohen, the Five Pillars of Influence: How to Get a Seat at the Proverbial Table, I strongly encourage you to do so. That event will be held on the evening of October 28th. And I neglected to say that if you're looking to join us on Facebook, you can find us at under BrandeisWomen, one word, so just search that.
Amy Cohen:
Before we begin tonight's program, I have a few housekeeping matters to share. First, we will be reserving time at the end of the discussion for questions. If you have a question, please post it in the Q&A function. We have disabled the chat function for tonight, and we'll only be using the Q&A function. That being said, we expect a lot of questions for this very interesting conversation, and we will do our best to get to as many as we can. Also, this event is being recorded and the recording will be available in Brandeis' virtual library found on the Brandeis Alumni Association's website.
Amy Cohen:
Our moderator this evening is Brandeis trustee, Barbara Dortch-Okara, class of 1971, who is a retired Massachusetts superior court judge. Barbara is a recipient of the 1990 Brandeis Alumni Achievement award and was the first African American and the first woman to serve as chief justice for the administration and management of the Massachusetts trial court. After graduating from Brandeis with a BA in politics, she received her JD from Boston College Law School in 1974. She was first appointed as a judge to the Boston Municipal Court in 1984, then to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1989 and was named to oversee the Trial Court in 1998. Barbara received the 2011 Trailblazer Award of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association and was honored by the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Lawyers with its 2007 Judicial Excellence Award. She is also the recipient of the 2000 Boston Bar Association Citation of Judicial Excellence, and honorary doctor of law degrees from New England College of Law Boston and Southern New England School of Law.
Amy Cohen:
Margo Jefferson, '68... It's a mouthful, these women are very accomplished. Margo Jefferson, '68, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the 1995 Brandeis Alumni Achievement Award recipient. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and Negroland: A Memoir. Negroland won the 2015 National Book Critic Circle Award for autobiography, the International Bridge Prize, the Heartland Prize and was shortlisted for the Ballie Gifford Prize. She has been a staff critic for the New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in many forms, including... Many magazines, including New York Magazine, the Nation, the Washington Post, the Believer, Bookforum, O and VOGUE.
Amy Cohen:
Her essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2015, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, What My Mother Gave Me, The Best African American Essays 2014, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, black cool. The Sammy Davis Jr. Reader, and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. She has also written and performed a theater piece. 60 Minutes in Negroland, at the Cherry Tree Lane Theater and The Culture Project. She teaches in the School of Arts Writing Program at Columbia University. Her forthcoming book is Reconstructing A Nervous System: A Memoir, which I can't wait to read.
Amy Cohen:
I've been looking forward to tonight for a very long time. And Barbara, I'm going to turn it over to you at this point. Thank you.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Thank you, Amy. Greetings Brandeis friends. I am so thrilled to meet Margo Jefferson. You heard all about her, but I'm just happy to be in her presence even though it's virtual. More thrilling is the opportunity to engage her in a conversation in which she will share how she discovered her gifts, how she blossomed and how her gifts matured.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Margo, why don't we start by talking about your Memoir, Negroland. You tell us in Negroland that you grew up in a privileged black community in Chicago in the 1950s. An immediate question that comes to mind is why did you choose the title Negroland? And what does it mean to you?
Margo Jefferson:
Yes, and I have my doubt sometimes. I chose it because I wanted... With the word Negro, I wanted it to stand for a particular historical period that I had been very much a product of. Black, Negro, colored, one of the marks of people's unstable and usually inferior status in society is names for them. Even the respectable ones keep shifting, right? Insults seem to remain largely the same. In the 19th century for example, colored was the preferred respectable term. Even in the early 20th, National Association of Colored People. Also whether you capitalized or didn't.
Margo Jefferson:
Negro then, a little later in the 20th century, became respectable, the honorable word. A. Philip Randolph, "Negro principles are not for sale." It had this tone or note of kind of stalwart uplift, keeping your shoulders high. It was a big deal that it became capitalized, I think the Times first capitalized it in the '40s. That sense of arduousness and laboring for progress and respectability, I wanted the word to symbolize all of that. It was like an historical marker. I tied it with land because to live in the world that I grew up in, which was largely segregated though with a little integration, it was, in many ways, to grow up in a segregated black world was like growing up in a land within a larger land. And particularly in many cities, but a city like Chicago with such rigorous, even cruel divisions, neighborhood by race and class, et cetera. Four blocks, crossing a boundary of four blocks could mean you were in another land, so I wanted land to have all those associations too. "What's your Homeland?" If you're a black person.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Interesting. Now coming from Chicago, how did you happen to arrive at Brandeis?
Margo Jefferson:
Okay. A couple of reasons.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
In your own land and now you head East to build on land?
Margo Jefferson:
In one way, I was just another. There's a long line of Midwesterners of all generations, every gender, every race, who if they think of themselves as artistic they have always wanted to go East and go to New York. I was one of those. I also had a sister who wanted to be a dancer. She was three years older than I, and she was talking about the glamor of New York and the artists, the arts of it. My parents also used to go there to see shows and hear jazz and whatever, so it was the Acme of artistic and urban sophistication to me.
Margo Jefferson:
Now I went to a private school from kindergarten on that was attached to the University of Chicago. And in its own way, for all its pride in itself, the University of Chicago is always comparing itself to schools in the East. Now how Brandeis in particular came about... I knew certainly by the time I was a pre-freshman, my school put seventh and eighth grade into one year and called it pre-freshman, that I really wanted to go to an Eastern college. My dilemma was I didn't really. Because I had been at this progressive small private school that was coeducational since kindergarten, I didn't really want to go to a girls school.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
So Radcliffe was out.
Margo Jefferson:
I did apply to Sarah Lawrence, that was my Bohemian consent. But my sister, my father, my mother and I were on one of those looking at college's trips maybe before my sister's junior year, and we were looking at all sorts of girls schools in the East. And on a train from one state to another, my parents got talking to someone who was a graduate student at Brandeis. And he said maybe not this daughter, maybe another, think about Brandeis, look into it. It's an interesting school. It also had certain things in common with the University of Chicago Lab school, which was my school. Again, that intense kind of feverish co-ed intellectualism, thought they were also pockets of other groups. Intellectual tradition that was very connected with kind of Jewish secular intellectuals, Marxism, refugee intellectuals. This was all, you know I'm not going to say as a high schooler I knew all this well, I think I looked up to those traditions.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Well now when you got to Brandeis, you were there between 1964 and '68. Brandeis was a hotbed of activism then. There was The Black Power Movement, The Anti-War Movement, The Civil Rights Movement and The Women's Movement. I remember that period well, because I entered Brandeis in 1967. I would guess that much of our audience could be two generations removed from that time. Can you tell us what it was like to be at Brandeis then, and how it shaped your view of the world?
Margo Jefferson:
Well one thing that's interesting, just the difference between your coming in in 67 and my going in in 64. The Anti-War Movement was really just revving up. I mean really, as this ferocious student movement, we were very, very involved in civil rights. But Black Power was not really going to emerge-
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Until later, yeah.
Margo Jefferson:
'66 and '67. The Women's Movement was not there yet. It's simple, it wasn't. Now again, we women were participating in every demonstrations. There were always exciting speakers around too. And there was so much talk going on in classes, in dorms. But the thing that was so interesting was to be on that shift from... Well, let's say if The Civil Rights Movement was embracing a kind of peaceful existence. '66, '67, The Black Panther's emerge, that's where that... Black student organizations, we founded that at Brandeis at other organizations, that's when the Black Power marches started, those years also. When was the March on Washington? The anti-Vietnam, was that '68? '67 maybe. The March on the Pentagon with the aggression, that really happened in those four years that I was there.
Margo Jefferson:
I think there was literally... Another thing that happened, I said feminism wasn't there but one of my clearest memories... This isn't exactly feminism, but it was a kind of liberation. My freshman year the birth control pill became available.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Yes. There was a liberation there.
Margo Jefferson:
The first who came back from a clinic in Waltham, Massachusetts "it's with the birth control pill." Big deal.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
And Brandeis dorms were co-ed. Not literally co-ed, not legally co-ed, but men and women came and wet amongst the dorms and that wasn't the norm.
Margo Jefferson:
Yeah, this is true. This is true. And then we'd all crowd together at Chumlee's for folk music. Was everywhere. Those years, if you are taking yourself somewhat seriously in college, which you might as well, you can have a good time. What you're experiencing will mark you forever. I simply wouldn't be the same person if... I came there with decent principles and politics, but to leap in, to be immersed in it as a way of being, a way of life, that was... Yeah. And to talk about these things with your roommates, your friends constantly, and it was everything was overlapping. You'd be talking about the war at one point and then some guy would you say, "Let me tell you, let me tell you! Have you listened to the latest John Call Train?" It was just... And the Trains arrived on campus. We were going in every, every which way.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
You were steeped in it, there was no way it wouldn't affect you.
Margo Jefferson:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
What were some of your most memorable times at Brandeis?
Margo Jefferson:
Well, going to Chumlee's and just sitting around, all closely packed together, hearing some of these, to us then, groundbreaking folk singers. There was Bill Oaks, there was the Prescun Jug Band, you were part of it.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
This was a big deal. This was a big deal. Chumlee's was in the castle at that time?
Margo Jefferson:
That exactly, yeah. And it was the coffee house. There'd be readings there also, there'd be little dramas would be staged there. Some intellectual experiences. My freshman year I was in it was a big lecture course, politics 1A, but Herbert Marcuse was a lecturer. He liked lecturing to undergraduate, and that was... I can still hear his voice. And I was not like you or like Angela Davis, I was not political science oriented, but that was absolutely thrilling. English professor, a poet named Allen Grossman to take his Yates saying enjoy his course was was profoundly thrilling. My junior year, sociology professor Lawrence Fukes.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Oh yes. Yes, I remember him.
Margo Jefferson:
He would have been a course that we could call a black studies course. And that was the same year that the Black Student Organization was starting, so that was significant. Yeah. Everything that mattered wasn't at Brandeis, but it started there. I remember my roommate Nancy Fedderman and I took could train to Providence to hear the newly-on-electric Bob Dylan, and took a train back to Boston the same night. But you were always doing amazing stuff because there was a lot of grass around. There was a lot of just student Bohemian life, and that was fun.
Margo Jefferson:
But the women's movement and what we now call LGBTQ, but what we would've called in the early '70s gay rights, they weren't there yet.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
That's a little later, yeah.
Margo Jefferson:
Being in a Gionet play, that was thrilling for me in my freshman year when I was there.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
That's all that counts, you were there.
Margo Jefferson:
I was there, and I had lines!
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Tell me, did you have any mentors that you looked to for guidance? At Brandeis or even early in your career, and were there any women among those?
Margo Jefferson:
No, it's a very... I looked at that question and I thought oh my goodness, because I've just been talking about this with a couple of very close friends. We are all the same generation, meaning we were born around '40, '46, '47, '48. We all went to college in these years, and it seemed... We are all writers, but it seems very few of us were consistently mentored. I don't mean that there weren't professors or later writers whom I admired very much, but sometimes with a male mentor there were... I was a jumpy creature. Sometimes with a male mentor there were strings attached or expections attached or pressures attached, so I was careful. And I regret that in certain ways, and that I think I could have handled this more efficiently, learned more from people who did genuinely want to teach me.
Margo Jefferson:
There were very few women in journalism who had been there for a long time. It was less true if you wanted to be a political reporter or a newsroom, there were more women there. At institutions, the ones where I worked like when I came to Newsweek, women there had just negotiated an agreement for women to be allowed to be editors and writers as opposed to just research. There weren't a lot of us. There weren't. You know how many good women writers. I was reading women writers and women creators constantly, but I was the first woman and the first black book critic at Newsweek.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
There there's no one to mentor you here. There's no one, yeah.
Margo Jefferson:
What was a kind of substitute, first of all that sense that the women's movement had given us and that black studies had given us and me. Looking so avidly, finding these writers, reading them, non-fiction, fiction, journalism and learning in that way, knowing that the whole cannon of writers and works you could learn from had burst open. That was absolutely great.
Margo Jefferson:
The other thing that helped was the women's movement. We weren't generationally so separate that we could mentor each other, but we could be, in a sense sisters, professional sisters. We formed writing groups.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Support one another.
Margo Jefferson:
Yes. We formed writing groups together, we formed political organizations like the National Black Feminist Organization, within which were groups, clusters of women particular involved in the arts, involved in writing. I don't know. I can't tell you how many women's groups I was in. How many writing groups, particularly.
Margo Jefferson:
That was a good thing, and I learned a lot from women editors I had but they all came a little later in my career, late '70s and '80s. And again, I learned from them, but they were my age essentially. It was tricky in that way. My friends and I were saying that one of the things we missed, which I think mentors especially, intelligent principal mentors. And it's not only that the bargain may involve sex in a way you don't want, the bargain can also in involve, I see this so much in the arts, a kind of stylistic and psychological bullying. "This is the way you want to-"
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
"This is the way."
Margo Jefferson:
"This is the way to do it. I will withdraw my interest and favors if you are not following this school." So mentoring is tricky, but when it's done honorably and well my God, it keeps you not only developing in your craft, but taking care of, curing your own career, your own progress. It's very easy to just take too much time on that book. I was mentored briefly at Columbia by Judith Christ, the then film critic. And she was the first person, first woman, first critic I wrote arts stuff for. And she was one of the people who said to me after a few years out of graduate school when I was just freelancing, she said, "You know, people don't take freelancers that seriously. Get a job." And I went to... Now that's the kind of thing that a mentor-
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
You needed to hear that, yeah.
Margo Jefferson:
Because my generation, we basically... I wonder if this is as true for you. You were just a little bit behind, but in law we did not enter the professions with training. With any training in how to write the way.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
I didn't really know I needed a mentor. I couldn't look around and see a lot of role models. I could see men, particularly white men, progressing ahead of me but I really didn't understand the help that they were getting. It was only much later it helps to have some helping to pave the way for you, I really didn't know the need.
Margo Jefferson:
"No, think about this. No, no, no, no, that's...." In ways that give you room. And just the sense of someone who's intelligent and seasoned basically saying, "I believe in you." It makes a big difference.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
It does.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
As you moved on and became the successful person that you are now, I'm sure that you have been called upon to mentor younger writers, artists, critics, journalists. How have you found that?
Margo Jefferson:
It's interesting because it always involves a kind of self examination that can be very rewarding, but can also be a little, "Oh, oh dear." When you're mentoring people, I mean usually of another generation, they're bringing questions, challenges, perspectives that aren't necessarily the ones you came up with. You might recognize their talent fabulously, but they're working with issues or in styles that you were taught. It's so easy to settle into a slight smugness that mentorship, "This is what I have to bestow." This business of offering really what you know and identifying what am best at? What in my position can I be most useful at? When do I need to send a talented young writer to someone else, to a colleague, to a friend, to another thing? Keeping that in mind and adapting to the particular needs of each potential mentee, it requires a lot of discipline. I welcome it, but at first I think when I started to kind of be asked to be a mentor I thought, "Oh, how lovely." But-
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
It can be hard.
Margo Jefferson:
Yes, exactly. It's work, and it's not just, "Oh, I'm working with this person." It's "I'm working with myself."
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Interesting. Now you've had a very successful career, acclaimed journalist, critic, professor, writer. Tell us about your journey. Was your path linear in plan, or was there a chance and risk taking that played a role in your professional life?
Margo Jefferson:
I would honestly say that it was both. Meaning I would, with a certain prodding usually from someone else in my life, I would go linear like when Judith said, "Freelancing is fine, get a job." And I thought yeah, there's a certain way in which you need craft, discipline, so I went to Newsweek. Then, after five years at Newsweek, I realized I felt I was getting stale. I was doing the same thing, same tone, same length of pieces, virtually every week. And I thought I need something more. I always had in my head, even though it took me a year, I do want to write books. I want a more varied voice. I left, and signed into a PhD program in American Studies at Yale. It was completely wrong for me, I left after a semester. I'd been publishing for five years, which also shows you why it wasn't for me. I thought, WHAT. I can do this reading on my own.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
You weren't afraid to walk away. Some people would say, "Oh I've gone this far, I better stick it out."
Margo Jefferson:
Fortunately I hadn't relocated in New Haven, I was still in my apartment. Then I thought all right, but something about in me wants to teach. And I taught a little bit. So I taught journalism, and that was also my way of starting to freelance and work with my voice in different ways. I started writing for places that were not at all, in terms of voice, style, aesthetics, politics, were very different from Newsweek. I worked for the Nation, I wrote for the Village Voice. Just trying to develop and get more expressive and direct.
Margo Jefferson:
And then I ventured back. I wasn't writing enough. I realized I was, I was turning... I was crawling in perfectionism and I was just getting... I was too nervous. I needed a push of a new deadline. And so that's when I went to The Times. And yeah, that was a big deal.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Yes.
Margo Jefferson:
And it was scary.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Right, I'm sure.
Margo Jefferson:
It was hard, that constant doing, turning it out, turning it out, turning it out. But there, too, I found a way to be as varied as I could. I was a beat critic in that I was a book critic, but I really tried to do an extremely wide range of book reviews. And then I was able to arrange to be appointed the Sunday theater critic, because I had always had a real interest in theater. And then later I was able to get, after the Pulitzer, after enough good pieces so I could be trusted, I was able to get a column where I could write about anything I wanted. In that way, staying at The Times for, I think it was 14 years. I went in 1993, I left in 2005, six, but in that I was varying it. I was being nonlinear within that linear.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
You were so successful there, what motivated you to leave? I mean, you had arrived.
Margo Jefferson:
Very much the same kinds of things as motivated me to leave Newsweek. I mean I had much more variety in The Times, so much prestige, and they'd given me a lot of range for which I remain grateful. But I knew I'm kind of a slow writer. I wanted to write books. And I thought not going to happen. I started working on Michael Jackson while I was still at The Times and I thought I kind of know myself, it's not really going to happen if I'm... You have to, in some way, put that job first. Of course there are other writers at the time who did books and stayed there, you also have to learn what you can do and what you can't.
Margo Jefferson:
I thought okay, I had kept teaching maybe one course a year or one a semester for most of those years at The Times, at Newsweek, at Columbia, so I had kept my hand in. So I thought okay, this time if I go back into teaching I want to be in a fine arts program... Sorry, a writing. Yeah, school of the fine arts, a writing program rather than a journalism program because I want more room to teach and to work with more forms of writing, like essay, like memoir. More stylistic range than journalism schools, including Columbia at the time, had gotten more and more varied, more range I wanted than journalism schools will always give you. I negotiated and ended up at Columbia, taught some, taught also at the new school, and that has...
Margo Jefferson:
It still takes me a while, but I did that right after Michael Jackson came out and here we are. Then came Negroland, and now this other book which I've changed the title to Constructing rather than Reconstructing. It's a mesh of arts writing and memoir, and trying to put them together so that you are writing about a singer or a dancer in a very intimate way. And I'm trying to treat my experiences with artists, with art, with entertainment, as experiences that are as formative and as intimate as what we think of as the more traditional memoir material. For family yes, they're there. Absolutely.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Can you tell us a little bit more about that your latest book? It's a memoir as well?
Margo Jefferson:
It is both. For example, there's a piece early on where I am a child. I'm listening to Bud Powell, the great jazz musician, in my parents' house, and then I'm listening to Ella Fitzgerald. But conversations that I'm having with my father as a young child about Bud Powell, about discrimination, racism, that's filtered in to the way I listen to his music. Turning to Ella Fitzgerald is partly that I am looking for not literally role models, but images of fiercely talented women who can do... Who can create art and make art as powerfully as men. But Ella Fitzgerald rattles me because I want her to be glamorous and beautiful, because of course one wants that. She rattles me. And also she sweats, she sweats on TV all the of time and I've kind of been taught that's a little... It's a mark of something that's a little lower class, and you should say perspire anyway, not sweat. Those kinds of that intermingling of lessons and thoughts and fantasies and the listening to this music, and I-
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
But it's not historical, strictly?
Margo Jefferson:
No, that's exactly right. No, that's exactly right. There is some historical lineages there. Some of the people I look at are Josephine Baker, Nat Cole. It moves, there are historical chunks, but it is... I would call it a collage.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Oh, I'm looking forward to that. That's exciting. Well another question I'd like... I'd like you to look back over your career, and what kind of advice, personal advice and professional advice, would you give to your younger self?
Margo Jefferson:
Be braver. Yes. Don't don't second guess yourself. What do my readers think of me? What do my editors think with me? Just really keep a conversation going, I would say, to work on yourself, with yourself about what matters most to you in the work you're choosing to do. Be aware of other of the ambitions that you want filled, the moral ones of the conventions that you must adjust to because we all work within them. Whatever the magazine is, the newspaper, the... But keep looking for ways to challenge yourself to be brave. And I would say, apropos of our discussion about mentors, I would've said try harder to find them. Be braver about that too. And take care with your career, treat it respectfully.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Well it sounds like you were pretty brave to begin with, how much braver could you be?
Margo Jefferson:
No, if I were braver I don't think I would've taken as long to write this book. And I think also the five years between that book and Negroland and then the five years between Negroland and this book, I think I could have condensed them a little bit. I'm not the only writer who doubts and agonizes but yeah, I do think some little timorous thoughts and anxieties sort of slowed me down.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Well we have some questions from our audience, and let me see if I can get the first one to you. The first one is, "What extracurriculars did you do at Brandeis? Did you write for The Justice?"
Margo Jefferson:
It's so interesting. I didn't, nor had I written for my high school newspaper. The odd thing is I was very interested in writing and in literature, but I wasn't thinking of myself as a writer yet and I wasn't thinking of myself as a journalist. I took my English papers very seriously, and I scribbled little diary entries and some very bad poetry sometimes, but I didn't think of myself... Partly I wasn't a news reporter, I knew that. But I hadn't yet identified, I hadn't yet made that link between loving literature and reading it and writing about it as a critic. I did very little extracurricular work. My freshman year I was a cheerleader, but not for that. You know that what that was about? I had been a cheerleader in high school, and that was about continuing that sense.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
I didn't know there were cheerleaders at Brandeis.
Margo Jefferson:
It wasn't something that the Brandeis community looked up to. I Hightailed it out of there you're regressing, Margo. You're regressing. I wish I'd done, I was kind of good in fencing. And there was a fencing teacher, Mrs. Judge, wanted me to compete, to get with her and compete. And I said no. I made up some use that I couldn't do it. That was silly, that would've been fun.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
It really sounds interesting.
Margo Jefferson:
The only other thing... I didn't think of theater as extracurricular at that point. Yeah, it would've been very interesting. And I was lefthanded, that's an advantage.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Yes, I've heard that. Here's the next one: "I was a student from 1964 through '68. There were a few African American students. Did you feel comfortable on campus?"
Margo Jefferson:
In a daily way, yes. There were about 10 of us in my class, and all of us kind of paired off. Jackie and Phyllis I think, Carol Simon and I. Brandeis was then a "liberal place", and I put it in quotes but there it is, and I come from a very similar liberal environment. In general terms, I was comfortable. I would say I felt less so. I felt angrier and more alienated in '67 and '68.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Yeah. And another question, a little different, can you speak about the depth of intellectual discourse among Brandeis' early cohort of post World War II faculty? The depth of intellectual discourse among Brandeis' early cohort of post World War II faculty?
Margo Jefferson:
Well I'm thinking MARCUSE was-
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
MARCUSE comes to mind.
Margo Jefferson:
Exactly. And again I went into literature, English and American lit, but it was everywhere. It was in the speakers who were invited onto campus, it was... When I took sociology courses yeah, you read Hannah Aaron. Absolutely. But those names, they were going to be much more around if you were a politics major. I can still see friends of mine who were those majors talking passionately. But again, you knew it was part of the legacy and you knew you were supposed to take it very seriously. It was supposed to be part of your legacy, just as experimental art was supposed to be part of your legacy. Even if you weren't taking an art course. Who was getting decorated and getting exhibits at the Rose Art Museum was supposed to be part of your legacy. Now that was more American, that was American avant-ˈgardism of '50s and '60s, but in those years one was very aware that Brandeis had had these heritages and that we were supposed to take them seriously.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
All right. Now here's another question: "What gave you the courage to venture into memoir? How did you handle the discernment question; what must be said, what is better left unsaid?"
Margo Jefferson:
The book would not have taken as long if I had not found it very hard. What helped was when I realized that I didn't have to turn my back on all those years that I'd been a critic, but that I could use the critical faculty as a form of analysis of this world that I was part of, starting with this small black elite, and I could use it as a form of dialogue with myself. Criticism became a part of the process of telling a life story, that helped me.
Margo Jefferson:
And it's always what gets revealed, what gets not? Because this, the world I'd grown up in, was so involved with how it presented itself and how it was seen and we were always taught, you may have been too, don't don't reveal your weaknesses, let's not show our people as vulnerable or fallible in any way. Making that visible in the memoir helped me too. Examining that, in fact, is part of the legacy and part of what I was working with.
Margo Jefferson:
In terms of people who are still alive, often when people write memoir of a living person, if he or she or they play a big role, they have to read it, that's what your publisher asks you to. I was in the strange position of having lost both my parents and my sister who would've been really supportive, in fact, by the time the book came out. My mother was still vivid and intelligent while I was working on it, but she would go back and forth between being very helpful from the anecdotal to the historical, and then suddenly pulling back and saying something like, "You know Margo, I'm a very private person." I would think, oh God. What am I going to do? I did show her, because I knew she was declining, but I knew my mother had loved literature, that was part of the legacy I got from her. I showed her a couple of pieces of Negroland that I knew she would enjoy. I curated them in that way. And I was glad I had when she died, because she got to see some of it.
Margo Jefferson:
Otherwise you have to keep struggling with yourself, you have to write it as if you're not going to be scrutinized by anyone, and then start thinking.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
It must be difficult though, to anticipate some of the response of some family or friends.
Margo Jefferson:
Right. And to hear it or you now want it in some way to have to struggle with memoirs can be written to some extent from a desire for revenge, you have to struggle with it, you have to examine it, you can't let it conquer you.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
All right, here's a different question: "What can we do to bolster mentoring?"
Margo Jefferson:
I wonder if this is a question from a woman? Are there many? I'm assuming, yes. We're all in different professions. First of all if you are working for an institution, be it a school, a company, a law firm, a business, start looking around and see how that system is structured. How do the hierarchies work? Where are women of various generations in it? Compare what you and your peers, your let's say female peers or minority peers of all genders and sexes, anyone who's been discriminated against, compare what you had to go through, what your barriers were and what you were given, with what the people coming in after. That space is where one can start mentoring. Whether it's salary, whether it's still noticing, as you noticed in your law firms, "Wait a minute, these things... The editors, I'm watching these editors, they're still really taking on the young men around them. They're not paying attention to the women. How can I?"
Margo Jefferson:
You want to pay attention and intervene and watch both structurally and personally. And also make alliance with your peers, with all the women who are capable of, qualified to mentor and exchange ideas about how best to do this. And also ask the young things what they need, ask them what do you want most? What do you think? Oops, yeah. That's what I mean about remembering, it's not just what you think when you're mentoring.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
All right, here's a question about On Michael Jackson: "How did you choose to write about Michael Jackson? Or why did you choose?"
Margo Jefferson:
I had adored him and then, like many, had suffered as the persona changed, even before the scandals and the horrors. I was talking with an editor, the man who in fact did edit the book, and he said we were talking about Michael Jackson, it was in the... I guess in late '80s, maybe early '90s. And he said, "God..." We both agreed he'd been kind of a performing genius. He said, "Boy, I'd like to see him get his due before he completely goes crazy." And I said, "Yeah, me too. Let me do it." He went crazy before. And he was this combination held of being a kind of smitten fan, and then distancing myself and then having to contend with all his controversies, his horrors, but also all the fascination he generated. Performatively, racially, gender-wise, that was in terms of American history, race history and performance history, it's fabulous material. But what was interesting was that I knew I'd be ambivalent and impassioned, and I thought well, that would be interesting to try to work with.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
All right. Now the next question: "Did the movement for change on campus make you uncomfortable? Did you see a disconnect between the liberal rhetoric and real substantive change when you were Brandeis?"
Margo Jefferson:
Again, I would say in the '64, '65, not really. You knew who your allies were, and those were the people you stayed with. Also I... Well no, that's a separate issue. We're talking about campus. '67, '68, again I was in my black power mode psychologically, emotionally, so of course I still had white friends, I had close white friends whom I trusted and whom are my off campus roommates senior year, '67, '68, two close white friends and then we two blacks. But my feeling was Martin Luther King was killed that spring. Not that anyone around me was responsible, but that big gulfs had opened and need to be, they weren't going... They couldn't just be closed. Well I lived two lives. I continued to live that life as a student at Brandeis, and then I lived this life as a black student at Brandeis who was a young black person. This tumultuous and emotionally and intellectually vehement time.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
The next question is very much related to what you've just answered, but I'll ask it anyway. "What happened in '67, '68 that made you less comfortable at Brandeis? Was it anything specific to Brandeis, or was it events in the world outside?"
Margo Jefferson:
It was really events in the world outside. It really was. Yeah. I mean you could cast judgment. I can certainly remember little conversations being such a corny liberal about it, "Why did this person ask me this questions?" Those kinds of things, but the cataclysms, that was in the world outside.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
I remember '68, and I think that that could be an answer for all of us. You cannot just simply think about Brandeis as the outside came crushing in, caving in on us and black students and others had to respond to it.
Margo Jefferson:
And we were also, as black students, responding to the whole Boston world, we were responding to all the other black students at colleges around us.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
And there were so many of them.
Margo Jefferson:
Oh, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
Well that's our last question, and our time has almost run out it seems.
Margo Jefferson:
It's true.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
We are wrapping up right on time.
Talee Potter:
Barbara and Margo, thank you so much.
Margo Jefferson:
Barbara, you were wonderful.
Barbara Dortch-Okara:
This is so much fun, Margo. Thank you.
Talee Potter:
This has been such an incredible discussion dynamic, and so incredibly interesting. And in fact I'm sure I'm speaking for everyone who is on this webinar, I can't wait to read the memoir. Thank you so much for taking your time and joining us today. And as a fellow I'm so incredibly proud of both of you for your accomplishments, and thank you so much for being here tonight.
Talee Potter:
For-
Margo Jefferson:
I know I'm talking to my friends from my class out there. Hello.
Talee Potter:
Just reminder, just as Amy noted in the beginning of the session, we have many exciting sessions coming up, some of them October 28th, November 3rd and November 18th. We have a book club, we have other events, so please check on BrandeisWomen, both on either Facebook on LinkedIn or in the email correspondence that you get from Brandeis, look out for the future events and join us. If you've not joined BrandeisWomen on Facebook look for us, just it's one word, BrandeisWomen, and we hope to see you in future events. Thank you again, Barbara and Margo.
Margo Jefferson:
Thank you, Talee. Take care.
Talee Potter:
And have a wonderful evening.
Margo Jefferson:
Bye-bye.
Talee Potter:
Bye-bye.