Book Review #60 - The Help

Gush, gush, gush, gush, gush! I cannot gush enough about this book.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, follows the lives of three women living in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi. Two of the women, Abilene and Minny are black, hired as help to wealthy, or trying to appear wealthy, white families. Eugenia, or "Skeeter" as she is called, is a white woman recently graduated from Ole Miss University and trying to become a writer. She is what probably most of us are, kindly ignorant of the world around her. Raised on what her mother embarrassingly still refers to as a "plantation" she lived in an environment with all the privilege and prejudice you'd expect from a southern belle. Living at home again, Skeeter doesn't quite fit in anymore among her friends, who are all married with children.

When a feminist editor from New York rejects one of Skeeter's submissions, she includes with that rejection the advice for Skeeter to write about what disturbs her. It is while playing bridge with her friends, that she becomes aware of her friend, Miss Hilly's, crusade for every home to have a separate bathroom installed for "the help", to contain the germs blacks carry that whites are more susceptible to, that Skeeter realizes she has found her subject matter.

Skeeter is the least developed character of the three but she is the means in which this uniquely uplifting story can be told. Without Skeeter, who at 22, finally and lonesomely comes of age, The Help would simply be another shocking look at the racial inequality that existed still so recently in the South. It is Skeeter's character, and her ambition to write a book that matters, that strips Abilene's and Minny's blatantly mistreated, funny and irresistible characters out of their perfectly pressed maid uniforms and into each of our lives.

I don't want to give away too much about Abilene and Minny, who became women I loved. They mattered to me. Abilene, especially, is so vividly written, that her voice, her mannerisms... her unguarded moments... took solid form in my imagination. More than anything, I wanted her to thrive. To triumph.

As rich as this book is in both characterization and plot, its real accomplishment is that it encouraged me to examine my own prejudices. Racism has always been a frustrating topic for me to think about, as has sexism. My mind has a hard time wrapping around the idea that there was a time when educated people - enlightened people - sincerely believed that any race or gender was superior to another. It seems our spirits must have always had the capacity for understanding that this could not be so, but The Help showed me how such beliefs are possible.

Stockett, a southern white woman herself, exposes with an experienced sympathy how many in this particular chapter of our nation's history weren't racist because they were mean-spirited or elitists, but because it is what they had been taught to believe. Foolish traditions, yes, but they were able to be easily convinced that a separate toilet was necessary because they lacked the scientific understanding about germs and contamination and genetics. They only thing available to counter such painfully offensive actions was personal reflection and, perhaps, their consciences.

More so, and what was really eye opening to me, were the attitudes of "the help", how their own actions and attitudes were also heavily influenced by tradition and fear - as much so as their white counterparts. Whites, with control and power, dosed out injustice after injustice that was defended by their fear and blacks adjusted to the degradation based on their own learning and fear. Minny was taught by her mother how to behave as a maid in the home of a white woman - what to say and do and how to say and do it. She also experienced first hand the consequences of breaking with that tradition, being fired and blacklisted and unable to provide for her family. The difference between what excuses the fear as loathsome or imaginable was the availability of recourse. Blacks had none. Or very little.

I must believe, as a human being, that there is something inside each of us that witnesses the value of our souls. However, blacks, then, had even less access to understanding and knowledge than their white peers which left them with little other than their own consciences as proof of their worth. How frustrating to be human whose freedom is limited by the understanding of others. It made me wonder which of us are like Miss Skeeter, Miss Hilly, Abilene or Minny. Are we currently kindly ignorant, arrogantly holding all the answers, quietly giving the best of ourselves with what society allows or protecting our vulnerability with a tough outer shell?

Perhaps, we are all of them, at different times of our lives, progressing at our individual rates of enlightenment and courage. As Skeeter explained, "Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, 'We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought'."

Amen.

Now, go read this book!