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Primary source: Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, memoir, 1968.
Caption: Moody reveals her experience of wandering into the white section of the local theater; she realizes, after the incident, that "whiteness" provided her friends with a different life.
Every Saturday evening Mama would take us to the movies. The Negroes sat upstairs in the balcony and the whites sat downstairs. One Saturday we arrived at the movies at the same time as the white children. When we saw each other, we ran and met. Katie walked straight into the downstairs lobby and Adline, Junior, and I followed. Mama was talking to one of the while women and didn't notice that we had walked into the white lobby. I think she thought we were at the side entrance we had always used which led to the balcony. We were standing in the white lobby with our friends, when Mama came in and saw us. "Essie Mae, um gonna try my best to kill you when I get you home. I told you 'bout running up in these stores and things like you own 'em!" she shouted, dragging me through the door. When we got outside, we stood there crying, and we could hear the white children crying inside the white lobby. After that, Mama didn't even let us stay at the movies. She carried us right home.
All the way back to our house, Mama kept telling us that we couldn't sit downstairs, we couldn't do this or that with the white children. Up until that time I had never really thought about it. After all, we were playing together. I knew that we were going to separate schools and all, but never knew why.
After the movie incident, the white children stopped playing in front of our house. For about two weeks we didn't see them at all. Then one day they were there again and we started playing. But things were not the same. I had never really thought of them as white before. Now all of a sudden they were white, and their whiteness made them better than me. I now realized that not only were they better than me because they were white, but everything they owned and everything connected with them was better than what was available to me. I hadn't realized before that downstairs in the movies was any better than upstairs. But now I saw that it was. Their whiteness provided them with a pass downstairs in that nice section and my blackness sent me to the balcony.
Now that I was thinking about it, their schools, homes, and streets were better than mine. They had a large red brick school with nice side–walks connecting the buildings. Their homes were large and beautiful with indoor toilets and every other convenience that I knew of at the time. Every house I had ever lived in was a one– or two–room shack with an outdoor toilet. It really bothered me that they had all these nice things and we had nothing. "There is a secret to it besides being white," I thought. Then my mind got all wrapped up in trying to uncover that secret.
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Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell/Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1968).
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