Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

I was sick of pretending, sick of selling my feelings for a dollar a day.

I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people.

I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway.

But courage was growing in me too. Little by little it was getting harder and harder for me not to speak out.

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. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew.

We shall overcome, We shall overcome / We shall overcome some day.' I WONDER. I really WONDER.

I had to live my life as I saw it.

I sat there listening to "We Shall Overcome," looking out of the window at the passing Mississippi landscape.

Their (the teenagers) way of thinking seemed to have been "God helps those that help themselves" instead of "When we get to heaven things will be different, there won't be no black or white," which was what my grandmother thought.

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.

It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.

It longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.