But Anne and Wayne, however, were very fond of each other and wanted to be able to hang out as friends. Mrs. Burke was stubborn and even had spies looking for the interaction between the two. Back then, it was always whites verses blacks, us against them, or Negroes opposed to Caucasians. People were murdered, bruised, battered, and maimed. Anne Moody reflects on the murders of her town, "At least when other animals (hogs, cows, etc.) were killed by man, they were used as food. But when man was butchered or killed by man, in the case of Negroes by whites, they were left lying on a road or found floating in a river or something" (Moody 109). These harsh social conditions that are explained in the novel cannot be fathomed or thought of. The conditions seem unrealistic, but to the African Americans who lived day-to-day with these problems life seemed like a never-ending sea of torture. .
Blacks struggles did not end there; economic problems were a huge barrier to overcome as well. Blacks were paid the bare minimum by whites and often had to rent land from the whites. This was called sharecropping, which is when most blacks could not afford their own land so they kept part of their crop and gave the rest to the landowner while living on his property (Norton. A People and a Nation, A History of the United States, vol 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 434-35.). The working conditions were not very pleasant, blacks had to burn trash, clean bathrooms, scrub the floors, and tend the gardens. Basically they were the menial labor of the economy. Anne Moody explains some of the torture that went on in some of the factories. "I stood there reaching up and snatching out those boiling hot guts with my bare hands as fast as I could My face, arms, and clothes were splattered with blood and chicken shit (Moody 145). These conditions show that the blacks were being taken advantage of both physically and mentally: "The faster the chickens moved, the sicker I got We all ran out suffocating as though we were running from death"(Moody 145).