Margo Jefferson
Margo Jefferson is the author and the main character in this memoir. Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism. She has written for The New York Times as well as a number of periodicals. This is her second autobiography, a follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 effort, Negroland: A Memoir.
In this unusually constructed memoir, Jefferson deconstructs her own identity and rebuilds it through an examination of major figures in entertainment. This is especially true of jazz music from the mid-20th century. Her primary literary role as social critic is adapted to analyze these influences from the inside-out.
Jefferson is an African American woman and as a result her autobiographical insight and historical reassessment is viewed through the lens of both racism and sexism. Her background fuses her academic approach with the unpredictability of free-form jazz so that the actual written content of this book easily moves from analytic formality to unexpected direct address to the reader.
Willa Cather
Like the author, Willa Cather is also a Pulitzer Prize winner, having collected the award for fiction in 1923 for her novel, One of Ours. Jefferson's career as a critic originated as a book reviewer for the Times in 1993. In this memoir, Jefferson's reconstitution of herself begins with a straightforward academic analysis of Cather's 1915 novel, The Song of the Lark.
Cather is presented as one of many white authors whose worldview influenced Jefferson during her youth. Cather's fiction which is most devoid of racial diversity is placed alongside Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind as those American works presenting a whitewashed version of America. These works were among the dominant aesthetic creations influencing the ideological education of on both sides of the racial divide. It was only when Jefferson herself discovered literary feminism that she found interest in Cather's works, however.
It would actually be Cather's own career as a literary critic that fuels Jefferson's reassessment of her admiration for the author's fiction output. Jefferson's admiration for Cather's role in furthering feminism becomes more complicated by the later apprehension of what she terms "Cather's racialized aesthetic."
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald is, of course, the legendary figure in American musical history known as the "First Lady of Song." As an African American woman who rose to become one of the seminal figures in the rise of jazz to mainstream prominence in America, Fitzgerald is a central influence upon the author.
Fitzgerald would go on to become notoriously full-figured at the height of her fame. Jefferson writes of how Fitzgerald's weight was referred to by others in insulting ways. This leads to Fitzgerald being viewed through the perspective of not just racism and sexism, but the particular corners of racism and sexism that focuses on physical appearance.
Fitzgerald—along with Louis Armstrong—also becomes the centerpiece for the memoir's assessment of how the jazz was transformed from its distinctly African American roots into a mainstream juggernaut by putting a white face on it. In this sense. Fitzgerald's legendary status is placed in juxtaposition to the superstardom of white male singer Bing Crosby. Although originally enjoyed and admired by the author, the later mature reassessment has her identifying Crosby as a minstrel man who gained his status by appropriating the purity of jazz embodied by figures like Fitzgerald and transforming it into "blackface" entertainment that white audiences found more appealing.
