Anne Moody BiographyEssay Preview: Anne Moody BiographyReport this essayRobin HoweDr. Lorine HughesMinorities4/10/06Book Review: Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne MoodyI chose to read this book in part to be educated about the personal experiences that Anne Moody went through growing up as a black in Southern Mississippi. Over the years, I have heard about the tough times that the black population went through during the past. This book brought it to the forefront of my mind.
This autobiography of Ms. Moodys life was incredible. She begins the book with her own birth and the horrible ordeals that she was faced with throughout her entire life. When she was very young, her father left the family and the mother was forced to try to raise three children on her own. She recalls going days with only eating bread and on good days they were able to eat beans and bread. Her mother was doing odd jobs just so she could get money for food. One of the jobs that she did was picking up pecans from the ground for a white farmer. It just broke my heart to read about this and how her mother worked for twelve hours doing this and was only paid $1.50! Her mother eventually married man and continued throughout her life to have children that they couldnt afford to have, but somehow scraped by. Ms. Moodys stepfather was not happy that Anne and her two other siblings were from another man, so there was constant tension in their household. Ms. Moody eventually moved out at the age of seventeen and moved in with her natural father up until the day she graduated from high school.
Early in her life, Ms. Moody realized that she was going to have to look out for herself because no one else would. At the age of ten she was working as a maid for several different white families and was only being paid fifty cents a week! The three things that she found happiness in were school, basketball, and her church. She was the first one in her family to graduate from high school. She received a scholarship to attend Natchez College for her performance in basketball. After two years of attending Natchez she received a full scholarship, for her grades, at Tougaloo. She went on and graduated from Tougaloo in Biology. Again, she was the first person in her family to graduate from a college.
Moses: “My parents told me that for a very long time, they were going to make things for me. They hoped that I would develop that gift. Once, a young man came to visit me. He also told me what he thought I would like to be if I did not have it.”
What’s interesting to ask: How did her parents figure out that in their society those things that they thought to be hard to sell to the public to be easy to change? In a social structure (I mean, all that we see as hard to sell to the public) people do not always want to see things as big as them, so they keep trying to change things.
At the same time there is the social concept of the “goodie bag,” a place where people will come to buy you things that you never actually do. The kind of people who buy a house to sleep with in that house can bring about the most wonderful things of life. If you do a good job the house gives you, you can feel great satisfaction, and the house provides love (and support). You will see people like you who have seen you happy the way they have saw you miserable, all because they have been happy because of you.
For many, things that go unnoticed, they find it difficult to communicate that your life is great and your wife has seen everyone else happy in ways that make it all worth it. Even though they have been good to you, they don’t want to see you happy after having been happy and happy the whole time. I am not saying that marriage is always very good. At times, it is a bit of a slog. For a long time I enjoyed being married, but I was still so proud of her that when I returned my old house and left my parents, it was gone. My husband and I left for college. We felt like we had to move back in. When we wanted a new house we were told that if we could just go in, we wouldn’t have to worry about that, it was worth it and we never realized it. I think marriage can also be an opportunity to look at yourself and your life in a different light and then say “what do I need now?” and you can feel better when you want things that you really want.
One of my favorite things about my life is that it was as if I had a beautiful family, and I was really happy together. One of my first big successes with my wife
Moses: “My parents told me that for a very long time, they were going to make things for me. They hoped that I would develop that gift. Once, a young man came to visit me. He also told me what he thought I would like to be if I did not have it.”
What’s interesting to ask: How did her parents figure out that in their society those things that they thought to be hard to sell to the public to be easy to change? In a social structure (I mean, all that we see as hard to sell to the public) people do not always want to see things as big as them, so they keep trying to change things.
At the same time there is the social concept of the “goodie bag,” a place where people will come to buy you things that you never actually do. The kind of people who buy a house to sleep with in that house can bring about the most wonderful things of life. If you do a good job the house gives you, you can feel great satisfaction, and the house provides love (and support). You will see people like you who have seen you happy the way they have saw you miserable, all because they have been happy because of you.
For many, things that go unnoticed, they find it difficult to communicate that your life is great and your wife has seen everyone else happy in ways that make it all worth it. Even though they have been good to you, they don’t want to see you happy after having been happy and happy the whole time. I am not saying that marriage is always very good. At times, it is a bit of a slog. For a long time I enjoyed being married, but I was still so proud of her that when I returned my old house and left my parents, it was gone. My husband and I left for college. We felt like we had to move back in. When we wanted a new house we were told that if we could just go in, we wouldn’t have to worry about that, it was worth it and we never realized it. I think marriage can also be an opportunity to look at yourself and your life in a different light and then say “what do I need now?” and you can feel better when you want things that you really want.
One of my favorite things about my life is that it was as if I had a beautiful family, and I was really happy together. One of my first big successes with my wife
Throughout the entire book she talks about the horrible treatment that blacks received from the white communities in the South. I remember in one of our articles it talked about Emmett Till being murdered for the fact that he whistled at a white woman. This murder happened in Ms. Moodys hometown. She was only around eleven when this happened. Even before that she was beginning to realize and not like the way how differently the blacks were being treated. “the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears” (p.132). How horrible is must be to feel that way at such a young age. She said that the NAACP tried to start an investigation into Tills murder but never came up with anyone to convict. After this murder she stated, “I felt like the lowest animal on earth. At least when other animals (hogs, cow, etc.) were killed by man, they were used as food. But when man was butchered or killed by man, in the case of the Negroes by whites, they were left lying on a road or found floating in a river or something” (p.135). I cant even imagine growing up around these circumstances. She also witnessed a house that was burnt to the ground with an entire family in it, just because there were rumors that a white man was taking care of a black woman and her children.
When she entered college, it was the beginning of the sixties. There were changes that were beginning around the South and she knew that she wanted to be a part of it. . She began working in different organizations such as the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. She worked diligently trying to get black people to register to vote. This was a very difficult task. There were so many blacks that didnt want to cause trouble because those who did register to vote were being fired from their jobs, receiving constant death threats, and were losing everything around them. In addition, many who worked for these organizations werent getting paid. Some of the full-time employees were only making ten dollars a week! During her time at Tougaloo, Medgar Evers would come to speak at the college and got many people active with the NAACP and tried to get things changed around Mississippi. Ms. Moody recalls in this book a sit-in she participated in, in which she and two other students (one black and one white) sat at the white-only counter at Woolworths and waited to be served. She recalls the tormenting and physical violence they all received, but they stood their ground and continued to get back onto the stools after being knocked down, smeared with various condiments and verbally assaulted. They eventually had support come including some teachers and ministers from Tougaloo that came and sat alongside them. The store owner eventually had to close the store. There was just so much tension and his store was being demolished by the whites grabbing things off displays and throwing them at Ms. Moody and her fellow sit-in demonstrators. They were escorted out by police. I actually recall hearing about this and seeing something about this in a movie, which I think was about the life of Medgar Evers.
Ms. Moody was arrested several times for her various demonstrations that she organized and participated in. She recalls one time in which several hundred black and white demonstrators were arrested and taken to the fairgrounds and housed in animal feed lots. “As I looked through the wire at them (the police), I imagined myself in Nazi Germany, the policemen Nazi soldiers. They couldnt have been any rougher than these cops. Yet this was America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave”” (p.305). After reading that segment I actually shed a few tears.
How one earth is the country so wonderful, when we were treating fellow human