Coming Of Age In Mississippi
Fortunately, the times of racial inequality had passed and belong to history now. However, the lesson should be drawn from those not so distant events to prevent any similar discrimination on the basis of race, religion, etc. The books like Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi help us learn this lesson. Alongside with its historical value as an autobiography of a civil rights movement activist, it has an enduring ethical meaning since it raises such concepts as dignity and humanity. From the book Coming of Age in Mississippi we learn both the history of civil rights movement and the value of human life. Anne Moody divided her book into four major parts: “Childhood”, “High School”, “College”, and “Movement”, that correspond to the major stages of her personal development, and those stages are somewhat similar to the stages of civil right movement’s development.
The childhood of Anne Moody, born Essie Mae, passes in a two-room shack on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Her father, Diddly, is a sharecropper, and along with her mother Toosweet he works hard on the plantation to provide for his family. However, the family lives in poverty. Anne’s father falls in love with another woman, Florence, and leaves the family. Toosweet moves off the plantation with her children and has to support the family by herself working as a waitress and as a maid for white families. Anne herself starts working when she is at the forth grade. She cleans the houses of white families after her school lessons. Thus, from the early childhood Anne begins to feel the difficulties of real life with its permanent lack of money even for basic needs, such as food and clothes. She has to work hard to have something to eat, whereas most of her white peers have all they need for life simply because of their social status. However, despite so much time devoted to work, Anne excels in school thus proving that she is not worse than others. At this stage Anne doesn’t have a clear understanding of racial inequality yet, but she sees the evidences of injustice every day, and her character forms under the influence of her hard life.
During her high school years Anne gradually acquires political awareness. She was fourteen years old when “a week before school started Emmett Till was killed” simply for whistling at a white woman (Moody 125). This event had a great impact on Anne. She tries to get some explanations from everyone she can, but adults refuse to talk about it. She tries to find the meaning of NAACP in her dictionary but can’t find. Finally Mrs. Rice, her homeroom teacher, gives her the explanations she longed for. Anne is shocked by the depth of the injustice that she always felt but has never realized so desperately. As she says, at the age of fifteen she began to hate people (Moody 134). Then, one of Anne’s classmates is beaten, and tensions between whites and blacks become even hotter. Anne is too nervous about all this, and she goes to her uncle Ed to New Orleans for summer. When she returns, she gets to know even more details about the collision. To calm down, she tries to concentrate on her study and work, but even this didn’t bring her peace of mind. She becomes friends with Mrs. Burke’s son, Wayne, and her employer gets really angry. Mrs. Burke is a vivid example of a prejudiced woman who believes all blacks to be inferior. So, even in her relations with friends Anne couldn’t be free from racial issues.
In college Anne becomes politically active. She acquires the first experience of organizing people at Natchez College, when she organizes boycott of the campus cafeteria. At Tougaloo College she joins NAACP, the National Assosiation for the Advancement of Colored People, despite the protests of her family. Her mother was even threatened by the sheriff, and a lot of courage was needed to make a decision to fight for her rights instead of staying indifferent which was much safer. Anne had another opportunity to feel all hatred of whites towards blacks when she entered the “Whites Only” section of the railway station. The white people were shocked at first but then began to threaten, and Anne with her friend Rose could be beaten or even killed if they were not saved by a black minister. At this stage of her life, Anne already clearly understands the injustice of the social order, and takes up an active position instead of resigning herself to the unfavorable reality.
The final part of the book, “Movement”, describes Anne’s full-scale participation in civil rights movement. She takes part in the famous sit-in at a lunch counter in Jackson. Four activists are denied service in the segregated lunch counter but they stay, and when white students come in, the quarrel quickly develops into the violent beating of black activists. Later Anne Moody becomes a member of CORE, the Coalition for the Organization of Racial Inequality. Alongside with other activists, she becomes a target of threats, which does not prevent her from working hard for the greater goal. However, she concludes that the movement is not that effective as it should be, and it focuses too much on the political issues. She wanted the emphasis to be put rather on the economical issues, to make the lives of ordinary black people easier. Besides, she finds non-violent measures to be insufficient and advocates for more radical means. All her doubts combined with desperate hopes find their expression in the last words of the book: “I WONDER. I really WONDER” (Moody 422). Anne Moody wonders here will they really manage to overcome racism as she listens to the song “We shall overcome”.
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