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.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Although this book was published in 2009, it remains a solid best seller, and the Disney movie “The Help” which came out this summer, is proving to be a just as successful. The book’s author, Kathryn Stockett, has based her book partly on her recollections of growing up with an Afro-American maid in her family, who was “looked after” (they paid her medical bills), but at the same time used a separate toilet when she was working for them. The book chronicles life in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s, specifically from the point of view of two Afro-American maids and from the viewpoint of a young white woman who gets the idea to elicit and write their stories and the experiences of other Afro-American maids in Jackson.

The young white woman, Skeeter, is a misfit in the young Southern belle world, being too tall and gangly for dating purposes and being literary-minded, in a down home kind of culture that doesn’t prize educated females. Fresh home from college, Skeeter wants to be a writer. Her naïve letter of application to a New York publisher expecting to be considered for an editorial position gets the attention of one of their real editors, who advises her start writing about “what she knows”, and to get a position at a local paper anyway she can. Skeeter eventually comes up with the idea of the maids’ stories, and it is just revolutionary enough for that place and time to get the New York editor’s attention and a promise to look at the finished copy.

Kathryn Stockett’s prose flows easily and I quickly became immersed in the three narrators’ lives. It was only at the end that I realized that some of the criticism being written about The Help was accurate. The book does end up being about Skeeter more than the two maids – it is Skeeter’s success that we’re rooting for, and for her escape from Jackson. What is ironic is that the maids also support her leaving, as though they are equals and have the same view of the culture that Skeeter does, as a white woman. In reliable, firsthand accounts of women at that time, even the imagining of any so-called “hardships” that single white women (like Skeeter) might be enduring would be a luxury of imagination that the Afro-American population as a whole was not interested in or motivated to indulge in. They needed all their energies to stay alive. The maids in this book, and in the movie, simply do not illustrate the actual conditions that Afro-Americans experienced at that time in the United States.

The audacity that prompts the older maid, Winnie, to conceal human waste in a pie for her white employer belongs to someone in a much more relaxed era of race relations. Stockett manipulates the maids' situations to a level of equality with the white women, as when a ragged naked white man tries to assault both the lady of the house and her maid. The book's lighthearted comic quality goes hand in hand with copious tears about the maids raising children not their own, and how emotionally available the Afro-American women are compared to frigid white women. While the book’s easy accessibility to its characters makes you feel that you’re present in their lives, this fiction is a sweetened up version of the real thing, like Minnie’s chocolate pie.

(This book was reviewed by my colleague, Dan, on 2/3/10)