Through My Eyes

In the preface, Bridges offers historical context for her story that will follow. She talks about the Civil Rights Movement arriving in Louisiana but notes that she was unaware of the racism in Louisiana and explains that “young children never know about racism at the start” (4). Though she does not mention the case by name, she references the Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case (commonly known as Brown v. Board of Ed.) that determined that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. She also mentions the high school integration carried out by the “Little Rock Nine” in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 and notes that “soldiers with rifles and machine guns mounted on military jeeps” had to protect the nine Black students that entered the previously all-white high school (4).

In Louisiana, a federal court set a deadline of September 1960 by which point the state had to start integrating schools. During that year, Bridges would be six and attending first grade.

Bridges offers some background on her personal history in this chapter. She is the first child in her family and was born on September 8, 1954. She cherished her time with her large family throughout Mississippi, but the family sustained itself through a considerable amount of hard work and faced hardship.

Bridges explains that her grandparents were all Mississippi sharecroppers. Sharecroppers tend land that they do not own, and must pay rent to a landowner in the form of a share of the crops they grow. The system of sharecropping that replaced plantation farming in the late-19th and early-20th century was abusive and often kept sharecroppers in debt. It was hard to survive and make a living on leftover crops after dues were paid, and Bridges reflects on that struggle.

Still, she says she loved visiting her grandparents and helping on their farms. During her youth, Bridges’s immediate family moved to New Orleans, but she spent summers on a vegetable and dairy farm owned by her grandparents. She remembers, “All summer long, my grandmother organized my cousins and me into work shifts, heading into the fields to pick beans or cucumbers or helping in the kitchen with the cooking and canning” (6). Despite the demanding schedule for a child, she also says, “I was tired, yet happier than at any other time of my life” and calls those summers a “gift” (6).

Bridges discusses New Orleans, where her family moved when she was four. They moved to a Black neighborhood and lived among others who “had left farms in Louisiana or Mississippi to make a better living in the city” (8). The large family rented a small apartment in a house. Bridges fondly remembers the kitchen and her mother’s decadent Southern cooking. Bridges says her “world in those days was comfortable and safe” (8). She played with siblings and neighborhood children in their house and on their street with little exposure to other city sites.

She also elaborates on her parents, saying neither received much formal education and noting that they had to work hard in manual labor jobs to support the family. Their jobs ranged from cleaning hotel rooms to building caskets. Bridges also stresses that Christianity was central to her family life, and especially enforced by her mother. Her mother, she says, was strict and doled out chores, and the children obeyed and loved her.