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BOOK REVIEW          CLARKE

Most evenings, after the Negroes had come from the fields, washed and eaten, they would sit on their porches, look up toward Mr. Carter's house and talk.  Sometimes as we sat on our porch Mama told me stories about what was going on in that big white house.  She would point out all the brightly lit rooms, saying that Old Lady Carter was baking tea cakes in the kitchen, Mrs. Carter was reading in the living room, the children were studying upstairs, and Mr. Carter was sitting up counting all the money he made off Negroes.

Crop failure and personal antagonisms turned some of these share-cropper families on themselves, because of their inability to fight their real enemy-the plantation owner.  They took their chances on the open job market that was not better than the farm.

Miss Moody shows how her father drifts away and drifts back again to make an attempt to bring his family back together.  The attempt fails because her mother has lost faith in him as a provider and a man.  She tries to hold the family together by herself and works first as a domestic and later as a waitress.  As a domestic she is paid five dollars a week.  This would seem incredible to most Americans who think that poor people are the makers of their own poverty.  They do not know that for years thousands of black families lived on the leftovers that domestics brought home from white people's tables.

This is in the main Anne Moody's life story.  It is also the story of so many other black youth growing up in the "civil rights age," and learning a new reality.

The last parts of this remarkably well written book are devoted to Anne Moody's life after she had broken with her family.  She attends two Southern Negro colleges, serves as a CORE organizer and as a voter registration worker.

Her book speaks well for the new literature of the oppressed, and for an outspoken generation.

John Henrik Clarke

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 12:45:45