Margo Jefferson - Constructing a Nervous System : A Memoir

I stood in a bright, harsh light. The stage was bare.

I extended my armno, flung, hurled it outpointed an accusatory finger, then turned to an unseen audience and declared,

THIS IS THE WOMAN WITH ONLY ONE CHILDHOOD.

It was part of the nights dream work. And I was rattled when I woke up, for Id been addressing myself. My tone was harsh and my outstretched arm with its accusing finger had the force of that moment in melodrama when the villain (hitherto successful in his schemes to ruin the heroines life) is revealed, condemned and readied for punishment.

I understood what I had to do.

At the end of his stage show, Bill Bojangles Robinson would look up at the lighting booth and shout, Give me a light. My Color.

Pause. Then

Blackout.

When the light returned, I knew it was time to construct another nervous system.

For most of my adult life Id felt that to become a person of complex and stirring character, a person (as I put it) of inner consequence, I must break myself into pieceshammer, saw, chisel away at the unworthy partsthen rebuild. It was laborious. Like stone masonry.

And on the stone masonry model the human self says go on. Admires itself for saying go on, and proceeds toGo On.

As I went on, I grew dissatisfied. This edifice was too fixed. I wanted it to become an apparatus of mobile parts. Parts that fuse, burst, fracture, cluster, hurtle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous thrum. THRUM go the materials of my life. Chosen, imposed, inherited, made up. I imagined it as a nervous system. But not the standard biological one. It was an assemblage. My nervous system is my structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.

Repeat After ME:

Its time to construct another nervous system

You write criticism. You write memoir.

What will be your tactics, strategies, instruments for constructing this nervous system?

I keep carping and fussing, rearing up against the words critic and criticism. Such august, temperate words. They make me think Gertrude Stein was right, that nouns are boring because all they do is name things, and just naming names is alright when you want to call a roll but is it good for anything else. When youre thrilled by a taffeta petticoat, a flying buttress, a sound chamber of notes and syllableswhen an idea makes you feel as if the top of your head were being taken offthen abandon your too-temperate prose zone and keep writing criticism.

As for memoir, I keep attaching adjectives to it. Cultural memoir, temperamental memoir: What makes me so anxious? I want memoir and criticism to merge. Can they? And if so, how?

Read on.

Theres no escaping the primal stuff of memory and experience. Dramatize it, analyze it, amend it accidentally, remake it intentionally.

Call it temperamental autobiography.

Be a critic of your own prose past. These words for instance.

A young novelist asked me: Why did you choose to write criticism?

I wanted to make my way to the center of American culture, and find ways to de-center it, I told her.

Why did you choose to write memoir? she asked.

I wanted to make my way to my own American center and find language for the fractures there, I answered.

These words arent wrong, and theyve worked to set the mood for readings. Theyre too smooth, though, too graciously incantatory. Too designed to show the valiant journey, the honorable aim. The rule assigned and assumed. (Stand up especially straight, please, you are one of the first black/woman critics here, you are among the first of your race and gender to steadily publish reviews in a cluster of widely read periodicals from the 1970s into the twenty-first century.) Writing to honor and claim a permanent place for the arts and cultures of non-white non-males and non-heterosexuals; writing to savor and display your ease with them all, including the arts and cultures of white male heterosexuals. Writing to display your own gifts and skills.

Is this commemoratively grand? Tonally accurate, though: those times and those settings required touches of self-protective grandeur. You were always calculatingnot always wellhow to achieve; succeed as a symbol, and a self.

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

On a stage filled with bodies, the adult orphans speak the last lines of the family play.

Exeunt alone.

Prepare to enter a new play.

As I write this I worry that Im about to hurl raw intimacies at new, uncommitted readers. If I delay, though, Im coddling myself. And pretending its for their benefit.