Viewing page 69 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BOOK REVIEWS

REALISTIC PORTRAYAL OF SHARECROPPER FAMILY

COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI. By Anne Moody.  The Dial Press, Inc., New York.  348 pages.  $5.95.

CONTRARY TO THE publisher's blurb, this book is not in the tradition of Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets.  It can hold its own without this comparison that is both unfair and untrue.  The book is an important testament to the black experience in America, from the point of view of a remarkable young lady whose talent promises much more in the field of writing.  This is part of the new American literature that is emerging from this nation's internal colony-the angry black community.

This story is painfully familiar to millions of black Americans who can endure the memory of growing up poor in the south while their parents tried to hold a family together under pressures not of their making.

The book is about an American peasant family-sharecroppers.  When the author opens her book with the following description of the family, it is not hard to predict that this family will eventually fall apart:

I'm still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter's plantation.  Lots of Negroes lived on his place.  Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers.  We all lived in rotten wood two-room shacks.  But ours stood out from the others because it was up on the hill with Mr. Carter's big white house, overlooking the farms and the other shacks below.  It looked just like the Carters' barn with a chimney and a porch, but Mama and Daddy did what they could to make it livable.  Since we only had one big room and a kitchen, we all slept in the same room.  It was like three rooms in one.  Mama them slept in one corner and I had my little bed in another corner next to one of the big wooden windows.  Around the fireplace a rocking chair and a couple of straight chairs formed a sitting area.  This big room had a plain, dull-colored wallpaper tacked loosely to the walls with large thumbtacks.  Under each tack was a piece of cardboard which had been taken from shoeboxes cut into little squares to hold the paper and keep the tacks from tearing through.  Because there were not

259

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 12:44:29