Have You Read "The Help" Yet?

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's 1962 in Mississipi, and a majority of white women have a black maid to help them at home. They trust this maid to comfort and feed their children, make their meals, do their ironing, but they don't want them to use their bathrooms. This is just a tiny example of the many little prejudices that black people in the South have learned to put up with. White people may treat their maids as family, or they may treat them as non-persons. Someone who treats them as fully human, may themselves face repercussions from their community.

The Help really brought home to me how dysfunctional this society was. The children would treat the black women that cared for them as if they were their mothers. They would play with white children, and love them. Until, that is, they reach a certain stage. I have no concept of what it meant to be black in that society, or in this society now. I think white people in general have no idea of the small or large inconveniences that are purposefully put on black people. We have no idea of the very real courage they had to have to fight their way to freedom, and that so many of them did that with dignity and grace deserves our applause.

The story is told in 3 unique voices: Aibileen, Minny, and Miss Skeeter, who is white. Each character is unique, and each character struggles with who they can become, and taking the courage necessary to become that woman.

The author, Kathryn Stockett, had a black maid in her childhood, so the story has authenticity. The book jacket tells us:

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and thir times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

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