Coming of Age in Mississippi

The cultural transition from youth to adulthood in the U.S. is often a period of chiefly physical maturation, accompanied by progressive changes in perceptions of the world that surrounds oneself. The years in which Anne Moody grew up in Mississippi were marked by often vicious racism, regardless of the emancipation of African-American slaves some 80 years earlier. The laws of many of the former Confederate states, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, often included in them provisions to severely limit the rights of African-Americans. Such passages as the Mississippi vagrant law, fining ‘idle’ blacks, illustrate this through the underhanded encouragement to keep blacks in their former place of servitude. Anne Moody’s coming of age in the era of the oppressive Black Codes was not only that of physical change, but chiefly one of mental growth from that of a victim of the injustices of the Southern U.S. to an active agent of change for her fellow African-Americans.

Growing up as the young child of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of Southern Blacks. As a young girl Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often by the table scraps of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little other than the squalor of their living conditions, she realizes this disparity while living in a two-room house off the Johnson’s property, whom her mother worked for, watching the white children play, “Here they were playing in a house that was nicer than any house I could have dreamed of”(p. 33). Additionally, the segregated school she attends was a “one room rotten wood building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get straight A’s while caring for her younger sibli...

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...ence against members of the movement. However, the emphasis on voting rights and not improvement of economic conditions led Anne to believe the movement “had “dreamers” instead of leaders leading us.” (p.337).

Anne Moody was a part of the Civil Rights movement firsthand, but in her coming of age as a civil rights worker she came to doubt the ability of the movement to make real concrete change for her people. Many of the leaders of the Canton voter registration movement languished in jail and her people languished in the segregated South. The willingness of the whites to hold on to their racist attitudes, and her own people’s willingness to accept “We ain’t big enough to do it by ourselves” (p. 424), led her to doubt the ability for her people to overcome discrimination, as Anne responds to the chants of we shall overcome with “I wonder. I really wonder”(p. 424).