The Help - Kathryn Stockett

 

     There's buzz everywhere about the book and the soon-to-be released movie.  Having grown up in the South of the 1960's I couldn't resist reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett but I was sceptical.  First, just because a book is a bestseller is not a guarantee that I will love it and second, novels about that troubled, conflicted period so often focus on the extreme violence and not the day- to-day tension that I remember.  This novel, however, did not disappoint.
      Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's, the novel tells of three women, two black and one white, who come together to tell the story of what it's like to work as a black maid in the white households of the South at a time when the roles of blacks and women were on the brink of change.
     Skeeter, a young white woman, returns home after graduating from college with a degree and the dream of becoming a writer but (to her mother's dismay) no prospect of a husband.  She has always been gangly and tall.  Her nickname, Skeeter, was coined the first time her older brother looked at her and declared that she looked like a mosquito.  Her mother's attempts at getting people to call her by her given name, Eugenia, have never succeeded.  She longs to take comfort from Constantine, the black maid who raised her, but she is gone and no one will tell her why.  She remembers Constantine comforting her the first time she was ever called ugly.

     "Every morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision."  Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums.  "You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?"
     She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand.  I nodded that I understood.  I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people.  And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child.  All my life, I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl.  But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

    When Skeeter applies for an editorial position with a New York publishing house, she gets advice from the woman who receives her application:  to get experience and to write.  "Don't waste your time on the obvious things write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else."  She gets a job with the local paper writing the "Miss Myrna" column answering letters about housekeeping problems like getting rid of bathtub rings.  She's at a loss - that was handled by the "help"- so she turns to Aibileen, the maid of a friend, for her answers.  One day she learns that Aibileen's son, who is dead, used to write and was working on a book about what it was like working for a black man in Mississippi.  Abileen tells Skeeter never to tell anyone about it but the seed has been planted:  Skeeter knows what she wants to write about.
     She persuades Aibileen, who is raising her seventeenth white child, to help her.  Aibileen cajoles Minny, a maid who is known for not being able to hold her tongue and who harbors the secret of the "Terrible Awful" she did to the daughter of her previous employer,  to join them and ten other maids follow.  They begin a secret project, risking everything in a time that saw the March on Washington, Martin Luther's "I Have a Dream" speech, Medger Ever's murder, and lingering Jim Crow laws.  Along the way, Skeeter learns the horrible secret about Constantine.
     In a brief explanatory section after the novel, Stockett, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, says, "I am afraid I have told too much.  I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us...I am afraid I have told too little.  Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or the time to protray."  But all of this comes through in Stockett's poignant novel.
     The characters are not just finely drawn - they live and breathe on these pages.  The story is told through the authentic voices of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter, all unforgettable women whose words form a multi-layered tale full of courage, heart, and hope.  There are few novels I've been compelled to recommend so strongly!
     I have not yet seen the movie but I've heard from someone who saw a preview that it was great.  I hope to see it soon.  In the meantime, here's a trailer!
  
- Frances