Coming of Age in Mississippi - Reflection
Uploaded by Gotskillz on May 22, 2005
About 8 years ago, I decided to begin reading some classics and this was one of the first I chose. Because of it, I now like to read anything I can get my hands on that involves slavery or the racial problems of these past hundred and fifty years or so. The emotion that exudes from this book was, at times, overpowering. It was awesome and I wish I had read it earlier.
The author deftly draws for the reader a searing and compelling autobiographical perspective of what life was like for her in the rural deep south during the nineteen forties and fifties, when she was growing up. It also gives a birds-eye view of the civil rights movement of the early nineteen sixties.
Written by Ms. Moody when she was twenty eight, it is a damning portrait of what life was like for African-Americans in the deep south. It tells of parallel lifestyles that were preordained and dependent upon whether one were black or one were white.
If one were black, one was destined to a lifetime of poverty, because job opportunities were limited to bottom of the rung jobs with no opportunity for growth and which were designed by their very nature to keep one subservient. It tells of schools so substandard as to make one non-competitive in the larger world. It tells of dilapidated and ramshackle housing without indoor plumbing that was the lot of many blacks in the rural south.
It describes the fear that was palpable in ones every day life, if one were black; a fear of making a white person angry, because the consequences that would follow could end up costing one dearly. It sums up the daily indignities which were a part pf growing up black in the rural south in the mid twentieth century. It is a story of frustration and anger at the inequities found in every day living. It is the story of how one young woman dealt with that system and survived to become a civil rights activist at a time when to be such was tantamount to asking for trouble of a deadly nature.
Well told and deftly drawn, the author conveys a real sense of the times in which she grew up. She ably captures an era in America that should not be forgotten, if only to remind the reader that it was not that long ago that...