Editorial Reviews
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica
Bauermeister
Blunt, powerful, and angry, Coming of Age in
Mississippi dares the reader to find anything poetic in the lives of
black people living in rural Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s, "where they
knew, as I knew, the price you pay daily for being black." Anne Moody begins
with her childhood - houses papered with newspaper, children left alone
because parents have to work, her own after-school housecleaning jobs that
begin at the age of nine so she can help her family eat. Smart and athletic,
she earns scholarships through college, but her thoughts are increasingly
consumed by the racism that surrounds her. She is one of the original
protestors at the Woolworth's counter in Jackson; after college she helps
lead a voter registration drive in rural Canton, Mississippi, "where Negroes
frequently turned up dead." She describes finding her own name on a Klan
"wanted" list, seeing a boy beaten as FBI agents watch from across the
street, hearing of murders - Emmet Till, Medgar Evars, John F. Kennedy, her
own uncle. She lives her life knowing she can no longer return safely to her
hometown and feeling estranged from family members who do not share her
passionate commitment to fight racism. She is easy on no one, not even
Martin Luther King, whose nonviolent stance she eventually questions. Anne
Moody's book, written when she was twenty-eight, is both proof of her
convictions and a forthright testament to the sacrifices, terror, and
courage that made up the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Ingram
Moody's famous autobiography is
a classic work on growing up poor and Black in the rural South. Her searing
account of life before the Civil Rights Movement is as moving as The Color
Purple and as important as And Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "A history of
our time . . . (and) a reminder that we cannot now relax".--Senator Edward
Kennedy.
From the Publisher
Written without a trace of
sentimentality or apology, this is an unforgettable personal story -- the
truth as a remarkable young woman named Anne Moody lived it. To read her
book is to know what it is to have grown up black in Mississippi in the
forties an fifties -- and to have survived with pride and courage intact.
In this now classic autobiography, she details
the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and
candidly reveals the soul of a black girl who had the courage to challenge
it. The result is a touchstone work: an accurate, authoritative portrait of
black family life in the rural South and a moving account of a woman's
indomitable heart.
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