Analysis Of Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

As a young woman of color growing up in Mississippi in the forties, Anne Moody grows up in a world where each day is riddled with uncertainties. From an early age she is exposed to uncouth acts of violence and discrimination that later fuel her quest for equal rights for African Americans nationwide as she becomes a powerful voice for in the civil rights movement. In her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody retreats back into the experiences of youth and by doing so pushes forward a powerful portrayal of what it was like to grow up in the south as a black woman. At the corner stone of her memoir lies the idea that growing up a colored girl in Mississippi everything is a struggle. Furthermore, that the homes of black families are not immune to the discrimination that they face beyond their four walls. Rather, this discrimination abides by no barriers and seeps into their homes and wraps itself around them, blanketed every corner of their

She divides her memoir into four main parts; “Childhood”, “High School”, “College”, and “The Movement”. In each of these sections, Moody powerfully displays the rippling effect of discrimination in the south. In the section entitled “Childhood”, she conveys a sort of psychological wild goose chase that she goes on to try discover what really separates her from the white children She explores this question in an almost humorous way, as she “thought the secret was their privates” (34). Furthermore, she examines the omnipresent discrimination in her childhood by recounting the experience of moving in with her step father’s family. It is in this part of her memoir that she touches upon how the members of her own community could discriminate against themselves. She asserts, “ they didn’t want him to marry Mama, and who wasn’t yellow..” (30). This idea of internal discrimination is an idea that Moody develops further in later sections. In the