Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody Read Free Book Online Page A

school the second year we lived on the Johnson’s place. Now that they were in school, I had a problem on my hands. Junior was only four and a half and Adline six. Mama started him early because she didn’t have anyone to keep him or for him to play with while Adline and I were in school. He wouldn’t stay in his classroom because he thought he belonged with me and Adline. I was now nine years old and in the fourth grade. Junior would follow Adlineeverywhere she went. Sometimes I would look up and he was standing outside my classroom door peeping in. I think I must have taken him to his classroom at least ten times a day. During the lunch hour, he would follow me all over the campus holding onto my skirttail. I would send him to play with the other boys. Then a few minutes later, he came running around a corner telling me some boy was chasing him.
    Mama was seeing the soldier again. He was out of the army now and he didn’t wear his uniform anymore. So now we called him “Raymond” instead of “the soldier.” He was coming to the house every other night now. When he was there he would help us with our lessons. Mama never did help us. She said she had only finished sixth grade, and she could barely read my fourth grade reader. But Raymond had almost finished high school. He could read and work arithmetic better than my teacher. I didn’t need much help from Raymond because Miss Ola helped me a lot when I stayed with her. She had taught me lots of words and showed me how to spell and write them too. Because of Miss Ola’s help, I made all A’s in reading and spelling. In arithmetic, with a little help from Raymond, I made B’s. In no time at all I was doing my homework without any help from anyone. Adline and Junior were the big problems. Raymond had to work so hard with them. He would take Junior over his lesson eight or nine times but Junior wouldn’t remember a single word afterward. He was a dumb little thing. Adline wasn’t as dumb as Junior, but she didn’t do much better. She thought it was funny to learn words. She would laugh the whole time Raymond was helping her. They never did learn their 1–2–3’s.
    When I was the only one going to school, Mama would buy one loaf of bread a week and a jar of peanut butter and jelly for lunch. I had a peanut butter sandwich every day. Now that all three of us were in school, she couldn’t afford the loaf of bread. So she bought ten pounds of flour instead of the five she had always bought. Each night she would make biscuits and fix two biscuits with peanut butter for each of us. I keptthe lunch bag and Adline and Junior would come to me for their lunch at twelve. I remember that once when I was eating with some of my classmates, I pulled my peanut butter biscuits out of that lunch bag and they laughed at me all day.
    After that embarrassment, I never took those biscuits to school again. We ate our lunch on our way to school every morning. All day long I was hungry but it was better than being laughed at by my classmates. Sometimes during the lunch hour Adline and Junior would tell me they were hungry and I would send them to the water fountain to fill up on water.
    Times really got hard at home. Mama was trying to buy clothes for the three of us, feed us, and keep us in school. She just couldn’t do it on five dollars a week. Food began to get even scarcer. Mama discovered that the old white lady living in the big white two-story house on the hill sold clabber milk to Negroes for twenty-five cents a gallon. Mama started buying two or three gallons a week from her. Now we ate milk-and-bread all the time (milk with crumbled cornbread in it). Then Mrs. Johnson started giving her the dinner leftovers and we ate those. Things got so bad that Mama started crying again. And she cried until school was out.
    One Saturday I went to get some clabber milk and the old white lady asked me to sweep her porch and sidewalks. After I had finished she gave me a quarter and didn’t