Anne Moody (September
15, 1940-February 5, 2015)
Four years after graduating from Tougaloo College, the young
Anne Moody published Coming of Age in
Mississippi (Dial 1968). It is noteworthy that this autobiography has
been “in-print” and acclaimed since its initial publication. Similar life histories of civil rights workers,
both autobiography and biography, have come and gone, getting enthusiastic
receptions when they first appeared.
After a few years, enthusiasm wears thin. The eagerly received life
histories age rapidly and virtually disappear.
Moody’s autobiography escaped this fate.
The title tipped its hat to anthropology, and Moody’s vernacular prose
is quite readable. Moody exploited the
dramatic possibilities of first-person voice and perspectives. She charmed a nation of readers who wanted to
know what growing up female and black in Mississippi entailed. Some of us who had been her classmates were
slightly alarmed by her minimal love for our alma mater, but we had to affirm
the rightness of how she saw Civil Rights Movement people and events in Mississippi
and in New Orleans. Coming of Age in
Mississippi had staying power. It is
a keeper of memories that some post-civil rights writers would be happy to have
disappear. Certain forms of “truth” may hibernate, but they refuse to disappear
and give aid and comfort to fickle tastes.
In Black Women Writing
Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989), Joanne M. Braxton
suggests that Moody’s book belongs to the tradition of Ida B. Wells’ Crusade for Justice and that Moody, like
Richard Wright and Maya Angelou, had intimate knowledge of Southern racial
horror. It is also probable that what
Zora Neale Hurston theorized about women’s forgetting and remembering in the
opening sentences of Their Eyes Were
Watching God opens a special window on how Moody speaks from a multi-gendered
space that entrapped women (and men) in Mississippi rather than the dream space
Hurston constructed in her novel. Women do seem to retain more details about
events than do men. Moody provides rich details about the critical turning
points in her life up to 1968. She
records the names, particulars, and dates of all that happened to her as the
daughter of sharecroppers in a part of Mississippi located around Woodville and
Centreville, as a person who began working at a very young age to keep herself and
her siblings in school.
Moody’s autobiographical voice often has the exactness of
discourses in cultural anthropology; it justifies the echoing title of Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Moody makes a “thick
description” of her life, layering detail upon detail, working out a full
description of her Self as vulnerable and subject to be denied opportunities if
she did not fight to control her destiny.
Readers must ponder what Moody says in Chapter 11 about the origin of
her misanthropic tendencies in 1955. Readers who piece together what is not in
the autobiography, what Moody chose not to say in another book about how
miserable life can become once a person achieves fame, will note that
misanthropy sponsors nightmares, mental imbalance, and death of the spirit as a
preparation for death of the body.
Moody’s life story from 1955 to 1964 is the record of how
she sought through education at Natchez Junior College and Tougaloo College and
through her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, the Council of Federated Organizations, and the Congress of Racial
Equality to control the resentment, the anxieties, and the self-hatred that was
her legacy from Mississippi. Her
descriptions of place are intimately connected with political activity or the
people who at various times were comrades in struggles. When she closes her story from a bus headed
to COFO hearings in Washington, D.C., her feelings about Mississippi and what
the freedom song “We Shall Overcome” proclaims are ambivalent. As the autobiographical narrator listens to
the heart-gripping words ----“We shall overcome, We shall overcome, We shall
overcome someday”---, she whispers skepticism into the charged air: “I wonder.
I really WONDER” (348).
The contemporary conditions of life in American and in
Mississippi justify the doubts Moody had in 1964. Much has changed. Social and political changes have been at
once blessings and curses. It is obvious
that the day of overcoming is still waiting for Godot. As we remember and honor the bravery of Anne
Moody and read her partial record of her combat with life, we find ourselves
chanting “We wonder; we really wonder.”
Jerry W. Ward, Jr., February
21, 2015
