Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Anne Moody tells her life from when she was small to age 24, growing up in rural Mississippi. The book was published in 1968, when she was 28.  Online, you can only see a few pictures of her, because since then she has kept herself out of the limelight.  Her story made an enormous impact on the country at the time, particularly among educated whites who were ignorant of what sort of life blacks were living at that time – whether in the Northern cities or in Mississippi where Anne grew up.  Smart, determined to be educated and to make something of herself, Anne lived in a world where “her kind” was ostracized from opportunity and kept so by the threat of violence and reprisal against anyone trying to change their world. 

Anne early on saw the dilemma her race was chained to, and she did try to walk the line - to survive but to keep her soul intact.   While working for white women, some tried to break her spirit, while others gave her the nurturing she needed.  She had to make hard decisions about where to go and who to live with.   She attended college only to realize there were no jobs waiting for her – unless she wanted to be a teacher and support the “separate but equal” establishment that helped ensure blacks’ secondary status.

In the end, there was the Movement.  Anne joined the NCAAP in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was going to college.  She writes stirringly of the hard work and dedication shown by many like herself, and by people who had come down to the South to try and register blacks to vote.  But they were living with fear.  Being followed by cars out on country dirt roads at night, men busting into their houses looking for them, groups of KKK’s burning houses - houses with children inside.  Anne breaks up her time with the Movement by going and living with relatives in New Orleans, where she waitresses and tries to forget the oppression that exists in Southern rural areas. 

Ironically enough, it was when she started writing her story that Anne felt the impossibility of reversing people’s views and ever eradicating racism.  When she heard Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, she didn’t share his exultation.  Now, over 40 years later, blacks and whites do work and attend school together, but inequalities persist.  Many young blacks don’t learn how to handle expectations of a generic workplace – they are tuned into their inner culture, not getting fitted to balance the demands of the outside world with their own need for affirmation.  Almost all teens have a time of breaking away and experimenting with what they want, what they think is important.  But some young people have an easier way back - back to school, to college, to jobs that can get you somewhere.

Why is her book still important?  Because she makes it real.  She doesn’t hide her feelings - whether it’s about her absent father, having white teachers for the first time in college, meeting gay people in the workplace, or her mother being hostile to her because Anne is trying to fight this thing, this life. 

I’m glad we have the book in our library, and I recommend it to everyone.  I wish she would tell the rest of her story.   You can access the catalog record here.

Sweetwater Creek / Anne Rivers Siddons

Photo by billread available through a Creative Commons license

In Anne Rivers Siddons' Sweetwater Creek, we find the coming-of-age story of young Emily Parmenter, a 12-year-old growing up in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Emily is a stranger in her own house, Sweetwater Plantation, where her father and two older brothers hardly know what to do with this girl on the cusp on womanhood.

Emily, whose mother left when she was a baby, just wants someone to love who loves her back. She finds solace of sorts with her impeccably trained Boykin spaniel Elvis. The Parmenters breed and train the spaniels and Emily is actually a bit of a savant when it comes to the family trade.

Nevertheless, her place in the family is an ill-fitting one, and terribly sad as we watch father Walter miss chance after chance to forge a true connection with his only daughter.

The catalyst for change is Lulu Foxworth, the mysteriously troubled college-aged daughter of a prominent Charleston family. When her family visits Sweetwater to see its spaniels, the connection Lulu has with the dogs is immediately apparent. Her parents asks if Lulu can spend the summer at Sweetwater and to Emiy's resentment, Walter immediately assents, eager to find an "in" with high society.

But what came, on the new wings of summer, was Lulu Foxworth, as glistening and beautiful and vulnerable as a beached Portuguese man-o-war, and just as dangerous. And for everyone at Sweetwater everything changed, and nothing ever went back to the way it was before.

The maelstrom Lulu brings with her will affect Emily the most of all.

Siddons crafts a riveting story about the idyll of childhood and the price we pay as we step toward adulthood and move beyond the boundaries of home. Her characters are well-rounded and believable. Emily comes across as a sensible girl who yearns for a kindred spirit, a vulnerability that Lulu latches onto. Even Lulu, conceivably the antagonist of the story, courts our sympathies as we learn of her sordid past. In many ways, she's a child herself.

Their relationship plays out in a way that has you hoping it's for real for Emily's sake. But woven into their developing friendship is an air of unease and even menace. This can only end badly, we think, but we read on because we want to be wrong. Siddons keeps us in her grip to the very end.

Delta Blues / Carolyn Haines, ed.; w/ stories by James Lee Burke, John Grisham, Charlaine Harris, et. al. & introduction by Morgan Freeman

"Delta soil is deep and rich. Down here things grow." (i)

Anyone who has even a vague concept on blues music and its origins will know that its heart and soul is in the deep south, particularly Mississippi and particularly the delta region (a small sliver of land adjacent to the Mississippi River in the NW part of the state). Ironically it's also a place not far from the starting points of some very, very good writers like John Grisham, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and on and on. With stories by John Grisham among others and introduced by actor Morgan Freeman, also from the Delta, this compilation "from writers aching to sing you the blues" captures the heart and soul of the region, its culture and its music as it tells of people and places where feeling a little blue can produce some fantastic and even revolutionary rhythms. This collection, very similar to the "[place] Noir" series of books published by Akashic, all involve, some directly some indirectly, the blues. Many are crime briefs while others delve even deeper matters like the famous "crossroads" story about Robert Johnson and the devil. Some are contemporary tales while others are historical pieces like Beth Henley's "What His Hands Have Been Waiting For" set in 1927 and which has a group of ruffians confronting a starving family during the great flood. All of them evoke the mood and ethos, as well as the language of the soul, of the Delta region and its people who've been forged through a rough life and hard times with their own brand of musical therapy. (FIC DELTA)