The Black Past in American History
Anne Moody was born on Sept. 15, 1940, on a rural plantation in Mississippi owned by a Mr. Carter. In her famous autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody said, “Lots of Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy, they were all farmers.”
In describing her social condition, Moody stated, “We all lived in rotten wood two-room shacks.” Mr. Carter’s big white house stood on a hill overlooking and overseeing the vast fields.
Moody’s parents’ shack was like “three rooms in one.” Mama and Daddy slept in one room and her little sister, Adline, and little brother, Junior (Jr.), slept in another room. Their parents worked from “can’t to can’t,” which meant they “rarely saw Mama and Daddy because they were in the fields every day.” They left before dawn and did not return until dark.
It was in her formative years that Moody became socialized to “white over Black.” She learned that being “yellow” or fair skinned has its privileges. Florence, a mulatta, a woman of mixed African and European descent that lived on the plantation, was feared by most of the other women who thought that Florence would take their men.
As a young girl, Moody worked for several different white families and became socially aware of class differences and racial attitudes. She learned that not all whites thought the same.
Moody’s common name was Essie Mae. The class question was revealed to Essie Mae when a white lady she worked for, Miss Ola, had a bathtub bigger than the one room she slept in. However, another white family she worked for, the Claibornes, permitted Essie Mae to eat her lunch at the kitchen table as an equal. Ms. Claiborne shared with Moody all the places in the world she had traveled, and it awakened Moody about a world outside of the plantation.
However, Mama noticed an air about her 14-year-old daughter that she found troubling, which was that Essie Mae began to think that she was the equal of white people. Mama said, “Ms. Claiborne has ruined you.” She thought her daughter would be following in her footsteps as a field laborer and needed only to communicate with white folk with words “Yes sir, yes ma’am.”
One important lesson Mama taught her was about sex and race. When she met her Black cousins, Sam and Walter, who were just as white skinned as her childhood playmates, Katie and Bill, who were white, Essie asked, “Why ain’t Sam and Walter white?” Mama explained that “their father is white, but their mother is Black.”
Mama did not know about the colonial “law of the womb,” which protected white slave owners’ propertied inheritance when they impregnated slave women. The law clearly stated that children follow the status of the mother. Mama did not know about the one-drop rule that most southerners, Black and white, understood—even one iota of Black blood running through one’s veins made that person Black, by law and custom.
A coming-of-age incident happened with Katie and Bill. By chance, Essie Mae and Jr. met Katie and Bill at the entrance to the movie theater and greeted each other warmly but were strongly and quickly separated by the white adults present. The children cried inconsolably.
Two other instances helped Moody come of age. One when she was working for the racist white woman Ms. Burke, who was a member of “the Guild,” a code name for the Ku Klux Klan. Ms. Burke paid Moody “slave-like” wages, made her feel like “rotten garbage” and required that Moody enter Ms. Burke’s home through the back door. However, Ms. Burke’s daughter, Linda Jean, permitted Moody to walk through the front door, paid her a decent wage, and said to Moody, “I am not like my mother.” Nevertheless, Ms. Burke succeeded in convincing her daughter to tell Moody to stop addressing Linda Jean by her first name and eventually reduce her wages.
The other instance occurred when Emmett Till was brutally murdered by the Klan. Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago visiting his cousins in Mississippi during the summer of 1955. Young Till made the fatal mistake of speaking to a white woman disrespectfully per southern culture, which required that any Negro man never speak to a white woman and only take direction from her.
Moody went home and asked her mother about the murder and her conservative but protective mother said, “An Evil Spirit killed that boy, and you gotta be a good girl or that same spirit will kill you too.”
Unbeknownst to Mama, who thought she was protecting her daughter to behave within the racist values and hierarchy of southern race relations, she was teaching Moody to be docile and compliant.
Now hearing how Till was murdered, Moody said these words: “I had known the fear of hunger, hell and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was Black. This was the worst of my fears.” In this context, Moody overheard Mrs. Burke and other white women in the Guild talking negatively about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and “niggers.”
Moody’s coming of age took another turn when she was 15 years old: She started “hating white people and Negroes too.” She hated Negroes because in her mind, they did not fight back against their racial oppression. She hated white people for the obvious.
This was when Moody started to express her disgust for “fucking Uncle Toms,” which was helped with clarification by her junior high school teacher, Ms. Rice. Ms. Rice taught her the history of Black folk and their struggles and resistance to white oppression, emphasizing the leadership of the NAACP. At the end of the school year, Moody learned that Ms. Rice’s contract was not renewed.
At this time, Moody was coming of age regarding being sexually aware about gender relations and the taboo of interracial intimacy that was always violated when she learned that “Every white man had a Negro lover in Centreville” where she lived. Moody discussed the taboo relationship between Deputy Sheriff Fox and her 17-year-old classmate, Bess. But the door of interracial intimacy swung both ways. Moody discussed how a fair-skinned well-to-do Mr. Banks slept with a white woman on a regular basis. This white woman had three children, and her white husband had abandoned his family.
In addition to these events that occurred while Moody was in high school, there was constant violence against Black people, such as the Taplin’s house burning and the murder of Sam O’Quinn.
Moody also addressed the problem of faith and church-hopping between her mother’s church, Mt. Pleasant Baptist, and Centreville Baptist. At this point, Moody conveyed the culture of the Black church through songs such as “Rock of Ages” and “Sweet Jesus” and sermons from Matthew 4, and how the women in the church were possessed by the spirit of God as they embraced both song and the preacher’s message, which Moody shared word for word.
However, one thing that puzzled Moody was the presence of Reverend Polk, who was convicted of murder and spent time in prison. Mama could not forgive Reverend Polk for violating God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” and “that is how Mama ended up at Mt. Pleasant and I remained at Centreville Baptist.”
After graduating from high school, Moody decided to attend the private HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in Tougaloo outside of Jackson, Miss. Tougaloo was founded by the Church of Christ in 1869 to educate the emerging ex-slave class now freed by the Civil War. The irony is that it is at Tougaloo that Moody came of age as a political activist soldadera that not only followed King but also joined the more militant youth organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with Ella Baker as its inspirational head.
Her best friend in this organization was a young white co-ed named Joan Trumpauer. Both newfound friends admired the older SNCC field workers who traveled throughout the Delta registering Black sharecroppers to vote, many of whom experienced being shot at by the KKK, bullets missing their ears by inches.
Moody writes about her first boyfriend, David Jones, and how she and classmate Rose impromptu attempted to desegregate a Natchez bus terminal and almost were lynched for their actions.
Moody discusses the Freedom Schools established for educating the children of sharecroppers and how the SNCC headquarters, called the Freedom House, was frequently the target of drive-by shootings by the KKK. These shootings prompted SNCC members to hide out in the backyard in tall, snake-infested grass.
Fearing their lives, two SNCC members, Lenora and Doris, attained guns for self-protection and defense. The danger was real with the murders of Price Lewis and Lewis Allen, both shot to death in broad daylight by local planter E.H. Hurst. And the murder of the major civil rights leader Medgar Evers placed a dark cloud over all of the SNCC workers. Because of this danger, Mama had written a long letter to Moody urging her not to join the movement.
Other local leaders who stared death in the face but did not flinch were C.O. Chinn and Reverend Ed King. Coming of age in this violent atmosphere forced, at one point, Moody to “reject God.”
Moody concluded her autobiography with the Kennedy assassination and its effect, and with a march led by Pastor Cox, who led the marchers in the song “Oh, Freedom”: with the lyrics, “And before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave…No more lynchings. And go home to my Lord and be free.”
It was during this march that a white police officer asked Moody and others, “Why are you niggers marching?” A young teenager answered, “Niggers…you mean Negroes and we are marching because we are aiming to taste a bit of that freedom you white people are enjoying.” Sadly, during this march “several cops” dragged McKinley Hamilton from the marchers and murdered him on the spot.
Moody closes her book reflecting on listening to King’s speech at the March on Washington and after returning home and thinking about the Dream versus the nightmares of organizing voters in Mississippi, Moody ends with the words, “I wonder, I really wonder.”
Moody died of dementia in Gloster, Miss., on Feb. 5, 2015, at age 74. The New York Times obituary picture was the iconic 1963 photo of her and Trumpauer sitting in at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson with angry white students abusing them.
