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Coming of Age in Mississippi is the amazing story of Anne Moody's unbreakable spirit and character throughout the first twenty-three years of her life. Time and time again she speaks of unthinkable odds and conditions and how she manages to keep excelling in her aspirations, yet she ends the book with a tone of hesitation, fear, and skepticism. While she continually fought the tide of society and her elders, suddenly in the end she is speaking as if it all may have been for not. It doesnt take a literary genius nor a psychology major to figure out why. With all that was stacked against her cause, time and time again, it is easy to see why she would doubt the future of the civil rights movement in 1964 as she rode that Greyhound bus to Washington once again.
The events that had occurred to her up to the point of the end of the book could clearly have disheartened anyone. Throughout the novel Moody shows displeasure with her family and fellow black citizens for simply accepting the circumstances and the position in which they lived. Multiple times she refers to the elder blacks as brainwashed by Mr. Charlie, referring to the white plantation owners. She condemns how anytime something clearly unacceptable happens, the black community hushes itself and moves along about their business.
This is evident even when she is fourteen years old and just entering high school. Upon the murder of Emmett Till, she questions why was he murdered and what was going to be done about it. Her mother responds to her questions with hostility, and this upsets her more. She wonders why she should remain quite about the incident, pretending she doesnt know.
After learning that Emmett was murdered because he got out of line with a white woman, she questions this rationale. Does that make it OK to murder him? How were his actions any different from how young white men treated black women? To ask these questions at this point in time were unthinkable to her mother and most anyone else she associated with. She was just a young black girl and should keep her concerns to herself. Moody clearly portrays herself as someone unwilling to accept society in its condition from a very early age, which obviously foreshadows her involvement in the activists community.
I would argue that the mentality of African-Americans to remain indifferent to circumstances and cause as little of a wake as possible is perhaps the single most important reason for Moody's ambivalence at the end of the novel. Her entire time spent in Canton is met with little support, if not disgust, by whites as well as blacks. While the county is primarily black citizens, they still remain submissive to the white citizens in the area. This truly confuses and annoys Moody. She is looked upon with contempt by nearly all of the elder blacks, and can only seem to reach a small number of teenagers. This is when she privately realizes that if a change is to come, it has to come with the younger generations, not with the older.
She again refers to the elder blacks as brainwashed and afraid to take what is theirs. The blacks in the county held nearly half the land, yet most were barely doing well enough to feed their families. She seems to initially think that the inferior thinking is only prominent in Centerville and Woodville, but when she realizes that this same mentality is present in Canton as well as all other parts of Mississippi, as well as New Orleans, this is only another nail in the coffin of her dream. Aside from the mentality with which situations were dealt with, the events that occurred to Moody were also quite devastating. The death of Media Evans, the leader of the NAACP, the bombing of the Sunday school class directly after the march on Washington, the open beating of McKinley during the demonstration in Canton are only a few events which caused her to question what it was all worth. After all the pain and sacrifice she had given to try and get blacks to vote during the Freedom Vote, only 80, 000 of 400, 000 had turned out to vote.
It was as if everything she was doing was fruitless. And when Emma's brother Clift was murdered, for the first time she directly lost someone because of the movement. Every time a life was lost she felt partially responsible. She even denounced her God, something which had been entrained in her from her childhood, because she could not comprehend how a loving and forgiving God could allow such atrocities to take place.
At one point she even accuses God of being on the whites side, and not acknowledging African-Americans as human. She distrusts the federal government because it was the federal laws that maintained the farmers in Canton County to remain poor regardless of the land that they owned. It would appear with these denouncements and overall distrust that she is losing hope in anything, from human spirit to the one that oversees it all. Another contributing factor I feel would have to include her family. Her mother and sister constantly criticized her efforts and encouraged her to leave the state and abstain from being involved the activists movement.
Complete alienation of Moody by her family when she moved to New Orleans is the clearest example of the disapproval that she received. Her own grandmother would not let her in her house for fear that she might cause trouble! At her mothers birthday party no one would really speak with her, afraid of what she might say. While her sister and younger brother still respected her, to be shunned by the majority of ones own family would have to be a very traumatic experience. Seriously, how much can one person take on a mission and constantly have little or no success and maintain a positive outlook?
Throughout the reading I was amazed and impressed with Moody's determination and drive. I am thankful that I was not placed in her shoes, because I am not sure that I could have maintained her level of courage or optimism. I feel she has the right to be somewhat questionable towards the end of the book, if not for her own experiences, to encourage anyone who reads her book to never give up on ones own dreams. With all her doubts, look at all that has been accomplished in the area of civil rights, and what might never have been if not for people like Anne Moody.
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Research essay sample on End Of The Book Anne Moody
