In Coming of Age in Mississippi, food symbolizes self-sufficiency and, ultimately, shows that self-sufficiency is essential for the path to liberation. At the beginning of the memoir, Anne’s parents are sharecroppers. They are dependent on work from the Carters’ estate to live. Throughout the memoir, Anne and her family struggle with lack of food due to Mama’s low pay despite doing back-breaking labor. Raymond dreams of being an independent farmer, untethered to the farms of white people. Anne describes one of the happiest moments in her family, when they are all sitting around the table and joking, during the first few days of their time farming on Raymond’s land. Because they have enough to eat, they are able to more easily be happy as a family. However, for most of the memoir, Mama’s stress at her inability to feed her children causes her to be depressed and cry all the time. Before Anne understands systemic racism, she does not know why white people eat better food than herself and her family. As Anne grows up and becomes involved with the civil rights movement, she hopes that the movement will focus on economic justice for Black people. Anne’s journey from a child’s wish for better food to an adult’s understanding of systemic injustice reinforces the idea that self-sufficiency and self-actualization comes from economic stability.
Food Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
“If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,” I thought, “she would cook better food for us.”
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.
[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.
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.
Food Symbol Timeline in Coming of Age in Mississippi
