39 pages • 1 hour read
Anne MoodyComing Of Age In Mississippi
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Raymond and his brothers build a house with five rooms for Moody’s family. Moody is disappointed there is no indoor toilet, especially because Miss Pearl has one. Moody and Mama buy furniture for the new house, but when Moody wants a four-poster bed with a canopy, the store clerk treats them coldly. Mama asks why Moody wants things that white people have.
Moody does well in school, but Adline and Junior do not. A competition develops between Moody and Darlene, Raymond’s sister, who is in her class, to outdo each other academically. Moody joins the basketball team. She plays well among her peers but freezes up when playing a team from another school. Her team loses, and then she quits.
Mama goes into labor, and Moody observes and hears the pain her mother is in. She wonders why her mother has so many children if birth is so painful. The baby is a girl, and Mama names her Virginia but calls her Jennie Ann. Miss Pearl comes to see the baby but does not acknowledge Mama. Moody resents Raymond because he too afraid to demand that his family treat Mama better: “Raymond is just fool […] He could easily put a stop to this. No, he’s too scared of hurting their feelings” (59).
Chapter 5 Summary
Raymond and his family attend Centreville Baptist, the biggest Negro church in town. Mama retains membership in Mount Pleasant Baptist and attends there because she does not want to sit next to Miss Pearl in church. Mama wants Moody to join Mount Pleasant instead of Centreville Baptist. During an intense revival sermon in which the minister mentions the devil and seems to point to Moody, she goes forward to the front bench at Mount Pleasant, and the church accepts her as a candidate for baptism. Mama buys her a white dress for the baptism, but Moody does not look forward to being baptized and tries to avoid going through with it. On the day of the baptism, Moody and many other candidates are baptized in a muddy pond with cows and manure in it. As she goes under the water, Moody feels mud sucking her down. When she emerges from the water, she feels dirty and muddy, “and the smell of mud lingered for weeks” (79).
Chapter 6 Summary
Raymond decides he wants to farm, and he rents some land and buys a mule. When he plows the land, he discovers why he was able to get it so cheaply: It is full of old bullets and hand grenades. He plants cotton and expects all members of the family, including his siblings, to help in the fields. Moody does not look forward to helping because it means she has to quit working for Mrs. Claiborne. The night before the field work begins, Moody has a dream in which heat overcomes her, and her family members lie dead between the rows. The morning of the work, the heat does overcome her, but no one dies. She later learns to enjoy the work. Mama and Raymond love farming, but Moody does not. Farming is dependent on the unpredictable weather, and the cotton crop does not bring in much money at the end of the season. There is nothing left to buy school clothes or even food: “If Raymond hadn’t planted corn and sweet potatoes, and Mama’s garden hadn’t been so good, we would have starved to death that winter” (89).
Chapter 7 Summary
Mama, Moody, and her siblings pick pecans for a neighbor and earn enough money to buy school clothes. Moody finds a job watching Linda Jean Jenkins’s young daughter and later helps with the housework. Linda Jean invites Moody to call her by her first name. This does not go over well with Mrs. Burke, Linda Jean’s mother: “Is that you what you call Mrs. Jenkins—Linda Jean?” (93). Mrs. Burke also questions why Linda Jean pays Moody so much for her help. Linda Jean replies that Moody is doing everything around the house. However, Linda Jean pays Moody less from then on. Moody is scared of Mr. Jenkins because he is the son of a mean sheriff in Woodville. Mr. Jenkins always talks respectfully to Moody, though, and she gradually forgets who his father is. Mama and Raymond get married a few days before the next baby is born.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
In Chapters 4 through 7, Moody examines what independence means both for her family and as an individual. Raymond builds a new house on land that his family owns, but Moody discovers that her family is now subject to Miss Pearl, Raymond’s mother. When Mama and Raymond get married, they do so without Miss Pearl’s permission, and Moody observes that Mama and Raymond look like they are going to a funeral, not a courthouse wedding. Raymond is “sad and scared” (96) and drives the car into a ditch. Moody and her family may not be living on white people’s land anymore, but a power dynamic still governs their lives.
Even Raymond struggles with independence. He has finished with his time in the armed services, and he turns to farming as a way of earning a living to be “his own man” (80). The crop does not bring in much money. Moody and Mama had hoped living with Raymond would be the end of their financial difficulties; instead, Mama must still find ways to make ends meet through pecan-picking and planting a garden.
Moody is now at an age where she can choose to become a member of a local church. Mama wants her to join Mount Pleasant Baptist and drops many hints in that regard. Moody joins Mount Pleasant, but she does not like the experience of being baptized in muddy cow pond. Becoming a member of congregation is not a free, independent decision on Moody’s part; she feels pressure from her mother, some church members, and a preacher. In addition to the actual mud and manure in the baptismal waters, Moody finds herself baptized into the dirt of pressure and obligation.
