Mama (Toosweet) Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
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 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.
“If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,” I thought, “she would cook better food for us.”
Every time I tried to talk to Mama about white people she got mad. Now I was more confused than before. If it wasn’t the straight hair and the white skin that made you white, then what was it?
I wanted to enjoy and preserve that calm, peaceful look on [Mama’s] face, I wanted to think she would always be that happy, so I would never be unhappy again either…. All those dreams about eternal happiness I wanted for Mama, I knew deep down in my heart that it wouldn’t last.
I looked over at Miss Pearl them again and saw tears in the corner of Miss Pearl’s eyes. “She should cry,” I thought. “She shouldn’t even be in church and she doesn’t even speak to Mama and she lives right next door to her.”
A Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.
“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here.”
I couldn’t understand why I seemed so strange to everyone. […] All of a sudden, I found myself wishing I was in Canton again working in the Movement with people who understood me.
Mama (Toosweet) Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
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 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.
“If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,” I thought, “she would cook better food for us.”
Every time I tried to talk to Mama about white people she got mad. Now I was more confused than before. If it wasn’t the straight hair and the white skin that made you white, then what was it?
I wanted to enjoy and preserve that calm, peaceful look on [Mama’s] face, I wanted to think she would always be that happy, so I would never be unhappy again either…. All those dreams about eternal happiness I wanted for Mama, I knew deep down in my heart that it wouldn’t last.
I looked over at Miss Pearl them again and saw tears in the corner of Miss Pearl’s eyes. “She should cry,” I thought. “She shouldn’t even be in church and she doesn’t even speak to Mama and she lives right next door to her.”
A Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.
“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here.”
I couldn’t understand why I seemed so strange to everyone. […] All of a sudden, I found myself wishing I was in Canton again working in the Movement with people who understood me.
