Coming Of Age In Mississippi

“Daddy must have beaten me a good ten minutes before Mama realized he has lost his senses and came to rescue me. I tried to sit down once. It was impossible. It was hurting so bad even standing was painful.” 

George Lee starts a fire and lies, saying that Moody was the one who started it. Even though Moody denies starting the fire, Daddy does not listen or believe her. Instead, he teaches her a lesson so that she will not play with fire again. This experience forms Moody’s strong sense of justice and injustice. She does not forget what George Lee did, even in her 20s. Moody later resists being unfairly blamed and punished as a college student at Natchez College.

“It was the first time I had seen the inside of a white family’s kitchen. That kitchen was pretty, all white and shiny. Mama had cooked that food we were eating too. ‘If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,’ I thought, ‘she could cook better food for us.’” 

Mama works for white people and cooks food for them. Moody and her siblings eat the leftovers on Saturday evenings in the white family’s kitchen. Moody begins to understand that there is a difference between her family’s house and the houses of white people. There is a difference between black and white people, but she has not yet figured out what that difference is.

“We had moved six times since she and Daddy separated. Now she would have a place of her own.” 

After Mama and Daddy separate, Mama supports Moody and her siblings. When she changes jobs, which is often, Mama finds a different place for her family to live, usually in a house on land owned by her white employer. When Raymond promises to build a house and support the family, Mama is relieved. The family will not have to move anymore, and they will be less dependent on white people. Having their own home shows Moody that it is possible to secure some measure of independence.

“I tried to open my eyes but mud was stuck to my lashes, so I just left them closed. I felt shitty all over. As they were leading me out of the water, I could hear the cows mooing, Jack laughing, and everyone singing, ‘Take Me to the Waters.’ Everything sounded far away. It took me a minute to realize that my ears were full of mud.” 

Moody emerges from the baptismal waters feeling dirtier than she did when she entered them. She did not really want to be baptized to begin with and later renounces the faith of her childhood. Being baptized into faith literally hampers her sight and hearing.

“After much persuasion on my part, Mama decided to let me keep the name Annie. I was so glad, I had always thought of Essie as a name suitable for a cow or hog.” 

Moody values independence. The name change allows her to claim her identity as her own, even if her family and neighbors continue to call her “Essie.” She goes by “Anne” in college, and she uses that name to author Coming of Age in Mississippi.

“Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black.” 

Mrs. Burke asks Moody if she knows why Emmett Till was killed and proceeds to tell Moody that it was because he “got out of his place” with a white woman. It is a barely disguised lecture to Moody on minding her place with Mrs. Burke, who now has a way to threaten Moody, and it works.

“Mrs. Rice got to be something like a mother to me. She told me everything I wanted to know.” 

Whenever Moody asks Mama questions about white people, Mama becomes angry, or she does not answer Moody’s questions. Moody asks a teacher about the NAACP, and Mrs. Rice answers straightforwardly. Mrs. Rice explains the difficult history about white and black people that Moody wishes Mama had told her.

“I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about and those I vaguely remembered from childhood. But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders.” 

Moody has little patience with weak people. She already resents Raymond for not standing up to his mother, and when she realizes that Negroes will not advocate for themselves and will simply endure bad treatment, she resents Negroes, too. Moody later feels frustrated with the Negroes uninterested in voter registration.

“I shall never forget the expressions on the faces of the Negroes. There was almost unanimous hopelessness in them.” 

As Moody stands looking at the burned Taplin house and smelling the charred bodies, she realizes that the Negroes feel powerless to do anything. Although they know the fire was set on purpose, they cannot help the Taplins and feel doomed to possibly encounter the same fate as fellow blacks. Moody also remembers the Taplin house burning at the end of the book as she rides the bus to Washington.

“‘I hear him fussin’ at you at you every mornin’ and you just sit there and take it and let him walk all over you! Um tired of him walkin’ all over you and treatin’ us like we’re dirt or somethin’.’” 

Moody’s impatience with weakness and bad situations comes to a breaking point as she finally has enough of Raymond. She is tired of Raymond “fussing” at Mama and tired of Raymond treating both Mama and Moody badly. Moody is also tired of Mama putting up with the mistreatment. The only way Moody can see to redress the situation is to leave because Raymond and Mama will not change. 

“After the sit-in, all I could think of was how sick Mississippi whites were. They believed so much in the Southern segregated way of life, they would kill to preserve it.” 

Moody and others sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter for three hours, taking various kinds of mistreatment. Ninety policemen wait outside the store, but not one tries to defend Moody and the other participants inside the store. Moody sees the extent of engrained white supremacy.

“I felt sorry for Jeannette King, Lois Chaffee, and Joan Trumpauer. Just because they were white they were missing out on all the fun we planned to have.” 

After Moody and others are arrested at a post office, they discover that even jail cells are segregated. Even though Moody and the white students have been living and working together, they cannot even occupy the same jail cell with the black students. 

“When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.” 

Moody and others visit churches after Medgar Evers’s death. One congregation turns them away. At an Episcopal church, Moody and her team sign the register, and ushers guide them to seats. She finds herself praying with white people for the first time in her life, but then recognizes some white people there and assumes that God must be on their side. Moody is surprised and hopeful when the minister invites them to come again.

“‘Most Negroes have been thoroughly brainwashed. If they aren’t brainwashed, they are too insecure—either they work for Miss Ann or they live on Mr. Charlie’s place.’” 

Moody ponders why Negroes are so resistant to registration and voting. Either they truly believe that black people should not vote, or they are dependent on white people for employment and housing. Many Negroes do not want to risk their livelihood for possible trouble they might face: eviction, unemployment, and/or bodily harm. As Moody later discovers, even independent and influential Negroes such as C.O. Chinn face consequences for encouraging others to register to vote.

“At this point I think it dawned upon those ladies that we were, in their language, professional agitators. ‘Too bad,’ I cracked to Joan, ‘now it’s too late—that’s a bunch of women for you.’” 

Coming of Age in Mississippi is a heavy and serious text, but one lighter moment occurs when Moody and Joan Trumpauer forget towels at a park shower. They dry each other off with paper towels, and white women witness this and become upset. As Moody and Joan leave the park in a car, they laugh out the back window at the white women, who understand only now that the girls got one over them.

“‘Negroes are going to have trouble until they’re dead, and after you are dead we’ll still have the same problems.’” 

This is what Moody knows Mama will tell her if she tries to explain why she feels so strongly about doing activist work. Mama’s assessment on the problems that Negroes face is also held by others of her generation and even older. Mama wonders why Moody works to change a system that will likely kill her for trying. This mindset is why Moody likes to work with teenagers, who have energy and hope.

“I am through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God.” 

After four girls die in the Birmingham church bombing, Moody renounces God and nonviolence. Those girls were in church, and God did not protect them. More than likely, God will forgive their killers. Moody decides that she is through with God. If God is black, God has proved Godself to be weak and ineffective. If God is white, then God is despicable because God desires the death of black girls and will not punish the white people who did it. Moody will live her own life now and not be answerable to anyone but herself. 

“It had gotten to the point where my weight was going down to nothing. I was just skin and bones. My nerves were torn to shreds and I was losing my hair.” 

Moody’s involvement and investment in the Movement are deep. She cannot go home to Centreville or visit her family for safety reasons. She and her friends face nightly threats and harassment from police and Klansmen. Moody is so nervous and stressed that she loses weight in an unhealthy way. This is not the first time she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown; at one point, she takes time out from the Movement and returns to New Orleans.

“‘You cops don’t have anything better to do than set in front of this office all the time? If you don’t, I wish you would find something. I get tired of looking at you.’” 

Mrs. Chinn shows no fear in speaking directly and straightforwardly to the cops in Greenwood, North Carolina. She and her husband are influential Negroes, and the police know there would be consequences if they harm or insult Mrs. Chinn in any way.

“‘I guess Negroes aren’t even considered human,’ I thought. ‘They’re just shot and butchered like hogs.’” 

Moody learns that someone murdered Clift, Emma’s brother, with a gunshot to the face. Moody shares the news with a coworker, whose theory is that this murder, and some others, were committed to produce terror and keep Negroes in their place. Moody feels powerless to address random “terror killings” and angry that the United States is not doing more to protect its own citizens.

“As the old man got within a few yards of the wall of cops, he picked up his cane and seemed to walk straight up to them without a limp at all.” 

Many Negroes are uninterested in advocating for voting rights and protesting against violence. At a march sponsored by a church in Canton, Mississippi, Moody is impressed to see hundreds of Negroes participating. After police beat a teenager in front of many witnesses, 80 Negroes volunteer to go to jail in protest. An 86-year-old man leads the march, and Moody is moved to see his courage as he approaches the police.

“As we were all sitting there eating, I looked at Reverend [Ed] King. And silently, I asked him to forgive—forgive me for doubting him when he first came to Tougaloo.” 

After Moody graduates from Tougaloo College, she goes out to eat with Reverend King, who orders steaks for her and the other graduates. She remembers that she was suspicious of him when he first came to the college as chaplain, but now that Moody has worked with him in the Movement, she has great respect for him.

“‘This ain’t the way, Anne. This just ain’t the way. We ain’t big enough to do it ourselves.’” 

Moody visits Mrs. Chinn, who is very depressed and discouraged. She cannot see how her work in the Movement has done any good because things have gotten worse. C.O. Chinn is in prison, and police harass her daily. There must be some other way to work for change, but she does not know what it is. Moody feels terrible about the Chinns.