39 pages • 1 hour read
Anne MoodyComing Of Age In Mississippi
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Four-year-old Essie Mae Moody, her parents, and her baby sister live in a two-room shack on the Carter plantation. Her parents work in the fields during the day while her mother’s younger brother, George Lee, watches Moody and her sister, Adline. George Lee, age 8, resents his duties and bullies Moody. He starts a fire that burns down the house and blames Moody for it. Moody’s dad beats her so hard with a piece of wood that she cannot sit down: “An hour or so later, it was so knotty and swollen I looked as if I had been stung by a hive of bees” (17). Moody tells Mama that George Lee started the fire, so a different uncle comes to babysit.
Mama gives birth to a boy and calls him Junior. Shortly after, Moody’s parents separate because her father has an affair. Mama finds other jobs and another house, but there is little money. Sometimes she steals corn to feed her family. At age 5, Moody attends Mount Pleasant School. She is frightened of the teacher, Reverend Cason, who speaks loudly. She starts spending 3-4 hours a day in the toilet. This works well until other students also spend several hours in the toilet.
Moody and Mama go to say goodbye to Grandfather Moody, who is dying. When they enter the yard of Grandfather Moody’s house, they encounter Diddly, Moody’s dad, who tries to give his daughter some money. Mama snatches the money away from Moody and throws it. Daddy stands up and walks away with a hurt look in his eyes. Moody and Mama go home and eat beans for supper. Moody is upset because the money that Mama refused would have allowed them to eat meat.
Chapter 2 Summary
Moody, Adline, and Junior enjoy the company of Uncle Ed, who now watches them during the summer. He often takes them fishing and hunting. Once, Ed takes them to his home. Moody is startled to meet Sam and Walter, brothers to Ed and Mama, who are white. Later Moody tries to ask questions about Sam and Walter, but Mama gets upset and does not offer much information: “Now you shut up! Why you gotta know so much all the time?” (31). Mama has a baby named James. James’s father is light-skinned soldier called Raymond. Raymond and his mother, Miss Pearl, come and take the baby away because Mama cannot afford to keep the baby and raise the other children. Miss Pearl says she can visit the baby.
One day Junior sets the house on fire when he plays with hot coals. Moody takes her brother and sister out of the house to safety, but then remembers the new clothes that Mama had bought them. She tries to enter the house to retrieve the clothing, but a neighbor pulls her out before the roof falls in. Mama takes a job with a white family as a domestic worker, and the whole family lives in the maid’s quarters for several months before finding another two-room house.
Raymond comes to visit Mama once a week and often brings candy for the children. Mama visits baby James weekly to give him a bath and wash his clothes. Raymond’s family dislikes Mama because her skin is so dark. When Raymond goes back into the armed services, Mama stops visiting the baby because Miss Pearl frightens her.
Chapter 3 Summary
Mama gets a job with the white Johnson family, and they move into another house. Moody’s family is the only Negro family in the neighborhood. Moody, Adline, and Junior play with the other white children. Mama takes Moody and her siblings to the movies. They arrive at the same time as the white children, and Moody follows her white playmates into the white section of the theater. Mama is upset and pushes Moody and her siblings out the door. Moody cries, and she can hear the white children crying, too. Moody wonders what makes black and white people different. As she and the white children play “doctor,” Moody examines her white playmates three times: “[B]ut I didn’t see any differences. I still hadn’t found that secret” (39).
Raymond returns from the service, and he comes to the house often. At age 10, Moody begins working for Mrs. Claiborne, a Home Economics teacher at a white high school. The Claibornes invite her to eat with them, and they treat her as one of their own children. Moody likes the Claibornes and all that she learns from them. Moody returns home one evening to find Raymond rubbing her mother’s pregnant belly. Mama is happy because Raymond plans to build them a house and to support them financially.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chapters 1 through 3 of Coming of Age in Mississippi establish the book’s unfolding narrative in chronological time, as well as the plainspoken voice of the narrator. Author Anne Moody begins with early memories from her life and enters into the 4-year-old’s experience with dread and fear of her 8-year-old babysitter. Even when Moody’s dad beats her with a piece of wood, the narrator’s voice stays true to the 4-year-old’s experience. The narrator does not insert her adult voice into the childhood experience and explain her dad’s actions; rather, Moody lets her child’s voice do the telling with feelings and details. The narrator uses this technique in various ways, from remembering snakes crawling into the house to wishing her mother would buy her skates for Christmas.
An important foundation of the book’s first three chapters is that all the action takes place on land owned by white people. Moody is born to a black sharecropping family, and they live in a shack on land owned by Mr. Carter, who sells the crops at harvest time and takes a share of the money as a rent payment. The likelihood of a bad harvest worries Moody’s father because that means very little will be left for the family to live on. After Moody’s parents separate, Mama eventually finds a house for her family to live on land owned by the Cook family, and this scenario repeats at least six times when she gets a different job. Moody’s family, like many others, is dependent on white people for employment and housing. When Mama tells Moody that Raymond plans to build them a house, Moody cries for joy, realizing that “[they] were going to be moving off white people’s places probably for good” (48).
