Constructing a Nervous System is a memoir by Margo Jefferson that was published in 2022 as a follow-up to her award-winning Negroland: A Memoir, released two years earlier. The term memoir is perhaps not the most appropriate categorization for this autobiographical tome, but it is really the only one that even remotely applies.
Jefferson a writer of social commentary and reviews for The New York Times as well as a host of high-profile periodicals. Her day job, so to speak, is teaching at Columbia University. As a result, Jefferson's background is clearly within the milieu of formal academic writing. Autobiography is itself a genre which is usually rather stodgy in form and structure. From the very first page, however, Jefferson makes it clear that this will be neither stodgy nor formal. In fact, she not only makes it clear, she confronts the issue itself.
One might even be tempted to describe it as a postmodern memoir. Which is a genre that so far would take up very little shelf space in any bookstore or library. Postmodern literature is defined in part as a deconstruction of form in order to construct a new perspective. Which is exactly what Jefferson states is her intention with this book. She begins by turning inward to admit that she is a formalist writer trying to convey a life in a way that is not traditional and that engages unconventional methods.
In just the first fifteen pages, the reader is confronted by a dazzling array. Those pages include the author asking even more questions of herself, a letter to the author's mother dated 2018, quotes from the works of writers like Amelia Etta Johnson, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Bronte and even the author quoting herself, the creation of a persona living within herself she calls Monster, the first of what will be many meaningful visits to the metaphorical ghost of Willa Cather which continues to haunt her, several poems, and also an ill-advised decision to give away the powerful unexpected final shot of the Paul Muni film from the 1930's, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Those first fifteen pages are really the entire book in miniature. What Jefferson means by the use of her titular metaphor are all the experiences with culture that served to shape her consciousness. These experiences represented those to which she was born into, those which were forced upon her by social circumstances, those she specifically set out to engage and anything else. This translates into the acquired biases of racism, sexism, ageism, and even body shaming. This memoir becomes a trip through the past in which she revisits those experiences anew, ready to deconstruct them as approached at the time of composition.
For instance, she admits that though she and her sister voraciously read Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, today that work of literature has been subsumed by the film version. The history of what remains the biggest blockbuster in Hollywood history when adjusted for inflation is one much trickier to trespass today than in the 1950's when the author and her sister only knew the complicated character of Mammy through the words of Mitchell. Both the literary creation and the author's memories of the story have been transformed forever—if not necessarily corrupted—by the Oscar-winning performance of Hattie McDaniel in the role of Mammy. It is a situation that makes the tricky history of the film an even more dangerous minefield for African Americans. Questions have to be asked such as whether McDaniel's forceful presence makes Mammy an embarrassment or a figure worthy of respect. McDaniel becoming the first African American performance to be awarded an Oscar introduces another level of ambiguity. The pride that comes with her accomplishment must be tempered by the racism she endured at the ceremony itself.
This confrontation with the film is essentially the template for the memoir. Jefferson will go back in time to provide social criticism of jazz legends like Ella Fitzgerald which in the years beyond her youth has forced a reckoning not only with the racism and sexism of the music industry, but the assault on Fitzgerald's girth. Her stardom is also briefly juxtaposed with that of Beyonce, who leaps from Fitzgerald's shoulders to become not just a star, but an entire galaxy in the substantially different racial environment of the 21st century.
This is the essence of Construction a Nervous System. It is a volume termed right on its cover a "memoir" that is also just as much a history of certain elements of 20th century pop culture. It is an autobiography just as much as it is critique of prejudice and discrimination over the same period. It is a story of the author's youth as much as it is a reckoning with both the progress made and the work still left to do on issues of prejudice and discrimination.
