Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Moody begins her narrative in pretty mundane fashion, at times testing the reader’s patience with her repeated recitations of her family’s poverty-stricken circumstances in rural Mississippi. In fact, the narrative begins in a kind of “in medias res,” for readers are only aware that they are reading about Mississippi from the title of the volume. It is many pages before there are sufficient geographical markers within the text to locate the physical territory. Then, after a painfully depressing, humorless childhood and middle school existence, Moody begins high school during the year in which Emmett Till is killed. Though she has been aware of inequity and racial issues before, her learning about Till’s death sparks an awakening that defines her activism throughout her college years. After Till’s death, Moody’s political activism dominates the narrative, whether it is leading a protest on her college campus about maggot-infested grits, sitting in at lunch counters or bus stations in Jackson, Mississippi, registering voters in Canton, Mississippi, or traveling to Washington, D.C. for the famous March in August of 1963. Her early life certainly intersects with those of Wright and Hurston in that she paints herself as the only person in her town of Centreville, Mississippi, who is sensitive enough or intelligent enough to be angry about and resistant to racist practices. However, her deviation from Wright and Hurston is dramatic from the moment she leaves her hometown. She engages in events that enable her to produce a classic African American political life narrative.