Mrs. Wiggins

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished the institution of enslavement in the United States after the Civil War ended in 1865, but unequal treatment of Black Americans and the formerly enslaved continued. Discrimination existed in all regions of the country, but legal forms of segregation were strongest in the former slave-holding states of the South. Strengthened by the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” public spaces divided facilities into those available for use by white citizens and facilities designated for use by “colored” persons, which was the term used at the time to refer to Black people or anyone considered non-white.

Restrooms and drinking fountains, school and swimming pools, public parks, jails, and hospitals were segregated, among other places. Private businesses gave Black patrons the least priority of service and Black people had to take inferior seats on public transportation. Laws were passed to restrict Black residents to living only in certain neighborhoods. Policing and the justice system were highly discriminatory toward Black residents. Separate hospitals, colleges, and care facilities were established for Black people, who were likewise discriminated against in education and employment and frequently denied the right to vote. These laws and codified practices were referred to as Jim Crow laws (Jim Crow was a derogatory term adapted from a character in a popular minstrel show). Segregation was not legally abolished until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Outside of institutionalized discrimination, members of the Ku Klux Klan resorted to harassment, terror, and violence to harm their Black neighbors. Bands of Klansmen, often men who held positions of power and leadership in a town, used vandalism, public bonfires, assault, and lynching, execution as public spectacle, to intimidate Black Americans. In a movement known as the Great Migration, millions of Black people moved from the South to other parts of the United States, seeking safety and greater freedoms that were not always awarded to them.

After the Civil War ended, ending the practice of enslavement that provided a labor force for large plantations, landowners in the South turned to sharecropping, a system by which workers rented and farmed a portion of land they paid for with a portion of their crops. The system often resulted in limited income and mobility for workers, which included Black as well as white farmers who lived at poverty levels, sometimes in debt to their employers.

Bootlegging is the practice of selling alcohol outside of laws restricting its production and sale. Bootlegging proliferated particularly in the Prohibition Era when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution made the sale of alcohol a violation of federal law. Though illegal, people frequently turned to bootlegging as a source of income, though it was not considered a reputable profession. Daisy’s association with bootleggers in the novel is meant to suggest that she keeps the company of rough men who have little regard for the law.

Though Monroe was born in Alabama, the geography of her novel doesn’t always map onto the realities of the region. Lexington, Alabama, is located in the north of the state, close to the Tennessee border. The town of Huntsville is 60 miles away; the border of Mississippi is about 70 miles west. Toxey, the town where Maggie visits the bar to meet men, is 250 miles from Lexington, and Mobile, where Hubert and Claude want to go to dinner, is 360 miles south, on the opposite end of the state. While the geography of Monroe’s Alabama might be elastic, her other historical details realistically depict life for Black Americans in the South during the early 20th century.