CHICAGO — Margo Jefferson, who has worked a half-century as one of the more formidable and composed critics of American culture, watched the city unwind from the back seat of an SUV. We moved slowly through traffic, maneuvering from the Loop to Wicker Park. She doesn’t get back here often anymore. She grew up in Hyde Park and Bronzeville but her parents, who loom large in her story and feel present in her everyday poise, died; her older sister, the ballet dancer and Ailey School director Denise Jefferson, died from ovarian cancer in 2010. “There is something melancholy in having one’s immediate family all gone, seeing many of their friends gone, much of their world gone,” she said.
Her Chicago is full of ghosts now.
Here, the Fine Arts Building, where she studied dance as a child; there, the shells of long-passed Chicago department stores where her mother, a socialite, once shopped. And those are just tangible haunts. She writes in “Constructing a Nervous System,” her recently published second memoir, about the Chicago actor Janice Kingslow, who died in obscurity. They never met, but Jefferson’s mother knew Kingslow, and as Jefferson recounts in the book, her mother and friends were having lunch in a downtown restaurant in the 1970s when “a frail, sallow woman approached their table and stood waiting till they grew silent.” None of you remember me, do you? she asked the women.
