Coming of age in Mississippi by Moody Anne Essay

Coming of age in Mississippi by Moody Anne - Essay Example The book four significant sections that it has been subdivided into. On the initial part of the book, the author reminisces on her childhood and the early years of her life. She spent this phase of her life in the rural parts of Mississippi. Her parents were sharecroppers and despite the fact that they were working from sun-up to sun-down, there still did not seem to have enough money to provide for food and other necessities like clothing for their children. According to Moody, they were living in a shack, but like all the other shacks in the plantation, they did not have any electricity or any indoor plumbing. Necessities which only the house of the owner had. She talked about George Lee who was tasked with babysitting while her parents were working in the fields, and also dwelled on how much he resented it, and vented out his frustrations by beating up the girls. One day, he was trying to scare the girls with the matches and accidentally burned the shack. He did not own up to this mischief and her father beat her up for it, thinking that she was to blame. However, her father eventually had an affair with another black woman and abandoned their family. She started working everyday after-school as well as on the weekends to compensate for the loss of income from her father's desertion. Moody talked about how they had moved to from one house to another for the next six years. Her mother was working two jobs; a waitress for a black people's cafe and a maid for white families. She talked about how their family was hungry all the time. They were only eating bread and beans most of the time, and some table scraps given by her mother's employers. Despite their family's desperate circumstances, Moody was doing really well in school. Most of the people who employed her as a domestic helper were generally nice and she has kept at this kind of work up until her senior year in high school. The only employer she had any real problem with was Mrs. Durke, which in her narra tion, appeared to be a nasty woman who was a racist. Mrs. Durke was apparently antagonized by Moody's closeness with her son, which resulted to her accusing Moody's younger brother of stealing, and Moody herself quitting the job because of it. Moody became quite popular with the male populace, both in school and in her community. She talked about how she was outgrowing her school dresses and worn jeans that were becoming too tight but which her family did not have the means to replace. Her popularity was such that she even got elected as the homecoming queen which seems to be a happy highlight in her youth. Her mother took pains of buying her a beautiful gown which made the occasion even more special. Her mother remarried and eventually had four more children. Her stepfather's family seemed snotty, based on Moody's narration, and looked down on their family because of their darker skin. However, she enjoyed being in their new residence, particularly the church which she described as having more class than her old church. She got into quite a lot of arguments with her mother, because her mother was insisting that she goes to the old poorer church. She was awakened to some pretty harsh realities when she heard about Emmett Till, who was 14 years of age and was murdered brutally for supposedly whistling at a white woman. She became very conscious of the racial inequality around her. As a younger child, she tried hard to understand the differences between the races, and has