Margo Jefferson is the rare memoirist who is always daring the reader to keep up. She’d rather recall her fleeting impressions instead of recounting a scene and the sheer volume of her allusions to 20th-century Americana – she worked for years on the culture desk of the New York Times – casts an instant spell. In her 2015 book, Negroland, she found a form that held together a portrait of her childhood in a rarefied black enclave in 1950s Chicago, and her early encounters with feminism as a young woman in New York, interspersed with musings on Little Women, James Baldwin and The Ed Sullivan Show. The book was alternately categorised as social history and memoir. The typical Jefferson paragraph, zigzagging through different perspectives, freely borrowing and repurposing other writers’ sentences and song lyrics, invariably reminds me of something one character tells another in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
Constructing a Nervous System begins with Jefferson reporting a bad dream: she is alone on a stage and “I extended my arm – no, flung, hurled it out – pointed an accusatory finger” at herself. You sense straight away that Jefferson’s intention is not to tell a story, but to relay an inner tempest on the page. In the next few pages, she quotes from a letter she wrote in 2018 to her dead mother, rewrites lines from an Ethel Waters song and confesses to secretly idolising mid-century black male singers because of their “immersive lure of danger and dominance”. She bristles at classifying these mental leaps as either criticism (“too graciously incantatory”) or memoir (“commemoratively grand”): “Call it temperamental autobiography.”
Jefferson’s formal ambition is akin to that of the “essay film” – I’m thinking here of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973) – where the need to simultaneously convey one’s adrift thoughts and inmost exigencies produces a marvellous density. Her project is, on the one hand, aggressively public spirited: a resettling of “American culture”, in her words. She explores how her artistic sensibility was shaped by an imaginative affinity with those who “won’t imagine you”: white novelists who were condescending or indifferent to black women (Willa Cather, Margaret Mitchell), black showmen with a history of abuse or apathy towards their female counterparts (Ike Turner, Bud Powell).
But the terms of Jefferson’s inquiry are personal. Just as Negroland was inflected with the tragedy of losing the milieu of her childhood, after the death of her mother, Constructing a Nervous System is haunted by the memory of Jefferson’s older sister, Denise, a dancer who died in 2010. You can picture Denise in the room when Jefferson recalls watching Ella Fitzgerald sweat through her TV appearances in the 1960s or while describing her teenage impressions of Gone With the Wind: “We feared so many things, Denise and I. We knew they were lesser things. They didn’t belong to the world of slavery. They belonged to the world of cautious privilege-parsing equality.”
Decades later, Jefferson is unsure about the privilege-parsing equality of her adolescence. She imagines an alternative ending to the gratuitous climax of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; she rephrases the well-known opening paragraph of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer to come up with a credo for critics. Black female athletes arouse a strange defensiveness in Jefferson, for she realises that she has “never worked as hard at anything” as the athletes have through their formative years.
In one of the book’s more delicate moments, Jefferson finds herself pitying Condoleezza Rice, who served as the US secretary of state during George W Bush’s presidency and was an advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Describing her working relationship with Bush, Rice once remarked that she was “internalising his world”. Jefferson recognises a similar impulse in her own obsession with white celebrities, her preoccupation with the sense of entitlement unavailable to her as a black woman in the US. “They were models I could imitate, adapt or make a point of rejecting,” she writes.
Jefferson says she feels disappointed “in a lifetime of reading white writers” by their incuriosity about black Americans. I share that disappointment, because I too have experienced something similar while reading contemporary American writers. Even as you are thrilled by Jefferson’s admissions and ambivalences, and taken in by the range of her whims and passions, you can’t help but wonder why it is just “American culture” that she wants to resettle, why her attention to the ways in which whiteness corrupts with the “expedient innocence of privilege” doesn’t take into account the fact that American omniscient narrators, both white and non-white, in fiction as well as nonfiction, repeatedly fail to acknowledge the existence of lives outside their country’s borders.
Much like the younger Jefferson, the non-American reader must learn to imagine someone who “won’t imagine you”. Jefferson riffs on WEB Du Bois’s landmark 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk, but Du Bois’s invocation of “double consciousness” was laced with the sense of a world beyond the Atlantic Ocean and he frequently expressed solidarity with anti-colonial struggles elsewhere. These days, many non-white American writers protest against domestic injustices, but they rarely breach the solipsism of empires.
Then again, if Jefferson were more worldly – less provincially American – perhaps she wouldn’t have been as attuned to the difference between the token black female characters in Gone With the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin or retained the ability to equally appreciate Erroll Garner’s blithe exuberance and Bud Powell’s darker melodies. It is impossible not to be stirred by her odes to fellow black American strivers of excellence, their determination to “prove our value to the world”.
• Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
