Coming of Age in Mississippi Quotes

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.”

She treated me just like I was one of her friends and I never thought of our color difference when I was with her, except when she paid me.

As they sang… I had chills all over my body and I was overcome by a sudden fear. The faces of the whites had written on them some strange yearning. The Negroes looked sad…. I got a feeling that there existed some kind of sympathetic relationship between the older Negroes and whites that the younger people didn’t quite get or understand.

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.”

When [Mrs. Burke] talked about Emmett Till there was something in her voice that sent chills and fear all over me. Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black.

I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about and those I vaguely remembered from childhood. But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders. In fact, I think I had a stronger resentment towards Negroes for letting whites kill them than towards the whites.

All the white folks in Centreville put together didn’t have as much as the Ourso family. I kept thinking of how unfair it was for any one set of people to have so much.

The dining room in Mrs. Burke’s house had come to mean many things to me. It symbolized hatred, love, and fear in many variations.

Whenever I was in the dining room, I felt like I was somebody, that I was human, because I had to react to living people.

I looked so good that it became somewhat of a problem. Whenever I was in town white men would stare me into the ground.

[Emma] didn’t blame Wilbert for shooting her. She placed the blame where it rightfully belonged, that is, upon the whites in Woodville and how they had set things up to make it almost impossible for the Negro men to earn a living.

After the sit-in, all I could think of was how sick Mississippi whites were. They believed so much in the segregated Southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it [….] I had always hated the whites in Mississippi. Now I knew it was impossible for me to hate sickness. The whites had a disease, an incurable disease in its final stage.

But something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement. It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the federal government was directly or indirectly responsible for most of the segregation, discrimination, and poverty in the South.

I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had “dreamers” instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream.

From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I set for myself.

“Why the hell should we be praying all the time? Yes, as a race all we’ve got is a lot of religion. And the white man’s got everything else, including the dynamite[….] Nonviolence is through and you know it.”

I couldn’t believe it, but it was a Klan blacklist, with my picture on it. I guess I must have sat there for about an hour holding it.

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.

We shall overcome, We shall overcome

We shall overcome some day.

I WONDER. I really WONDER.