Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

In fact, this issue of levels of color in black communities impacted Anne’s early life a great deal. If it wasn’t the straight hair and the white skin that made you white, then what was it? (page 35) Early on she remembers wondering about race and what makes someone white versus black, when there were some “high yellow” black people she knew who could easily pass for white. (page 29)Īnne was clearly an intelligent child and picked up on the subtle situations going on around her. That was when I discovered that white folks ate different from us.

Sometimes Mama would bring us the white family’s leftovers. At first Anne didn’t notice the difference in privilege, until her mother brought home food for her children: She and her children would generally live in a two-room shanty out back. (page 26)Īlthough Anne’s mother tried to stay out of serving in white homes as a maid, before long she ended up taking on that kind of work. She didn’t stop workin until a week before the baby was born, and she was out of work only three weeks. Similarly what we read about black women taking nowhere near enough time off of work to recover after pregnancy and birth is evident in Anne’s observations of her own mother: The strain on the family of poverty is abundantly clear. Similarly, early in her life, Anne’s father and mother divorce. Anne is left alone all day with an uncle who is only eight years old to watch her and who treats her badly because he resents being stuck with this responsibility. The harsh life as sharecroppers produces anxiety and stress in the family structure. Throughout the book there is personal, anecdotal evidence of the statistics we read about in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. History classes in the US have a tendency to run out of time in the semester right around the end of WWII. Plus this is a memoir set just before and during the Civil Rights era, which is a time period I must say I don’t know as much about as I should.

I was excited that it was my turn to host the discussion, because memoirs are one of my favorite genres (as my followers know). This project I am co-hosting with Amy truly seems to be flying by! We are already on our fourth read. Here we get to see her first-hand thoughts and memories of the struggle growing up surrounded by institutionalized racism, as well as the difficulties in fighting it.

She was one of the women at the famous Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in. Anne Moody in her memoir recounts growing up in the Jim Crow law south, as well as her involvement in the Civil Rights movement as a young adult.

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody