BOOKS: The Help

The Help just came out in paperback. If you haven’t read it, here’s why you should put it on your summer reading list.

A novel is elevated when it entertains us first and educates us second. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help could have been trite sentimental drivel or it could have preached against past wrongs, but instead she simply tells a story well.

Set in Jackson, Missisippi, in the early sixties, The Help tells the story of several black maids and the white women who employ them. In the sixties, every Southern white woman who was anyone had a maid, regardless of whether she needed or could afford one. The maids arrived in time to serve breakfast and worked all day every weekday. They cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, and cared for the children. Most were descendents of slaves and had no other work options available to them.

The story centers around Skeeter Phelan, who had just returned with a degree but no husband from Ole Miss, and her friend’s maid, Aibileen. Skeeter begins to see her home with new eyes, after her time at school. Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, has mysteriously disappeared, and no one will tell her where she has gone. When Skeeter lands a weekly housekeeping column in her local paper, she turns to Aibileen for help and Skeeter’s eyes are opened to their parallel world. She persuades Aibileen to let her interview her about her life as a maid. This leads to numerous interviews, the truth about Constantine, a book deal, and treading dangerous waters in civil rights era Mississippi.

The Help explores the lines in the sixties South: the unacknowledged rules that guide everything from which white women are in the Junior League to how a black maid sets a coffee cup down on the table in front of her white employer so that their hands do not touch. The white women in the story run the gamut of the Jackson social strata: Hilly is the belle; Elizabeth is the interloper who desperately tries to fit in but cannot afford to join the Country Club; and Celia is the backwoods social climber who will always wear gaudy clothes and use the wrong fork. Skeeter, actually named Eugenia, carries her nickname because she resembles a skinny mosquito. She is the unattractive intellectual whose mother expects her to be a proper southern lady. The women who work for them at different times despise them, resent them, love them, and protect them. As Skeeter proceeds with her interviews she hears the good and the bad: how some maids despised their employers and others considered them family. Despite their feelings none of them had the freedom to explore other options. The stark contrast between the parallel lives of the women who maintain these households underscores the huge discrepancies and complexities in a class-based society.

Race relations are always sensitive. Stockett succeeds in telling a racial story that grips, entertains, enflames, and emboldens. She makes her readers empathize with her characters and cheer them on as they break societal rules and push for truth and change. At one point, Aibileen, encourages her friend Minnie, “Kindness don’t have no boundaries.” which is one great message for readers to carry into summer.

A Somehow Related Mississippi Anecdote

Standing at the breakfast buffet at our b-rate Mississippi hotel, I started to fix a series of Belgian waffles for our four kids. As I started to pour the waffle batter, a voice stopped me.

“I’ll take care of that for you. You go ahead and make plates for the kids.” A middle-aged African American woman gently but firmly moved me on. “How many do you want?  Miss Annie Mae will bring them over to you,” she said.

I thanked her and proceeded to try to select from the breakfast spread: one child wanted cereal, another a muffin, still another wanted eggs and sausage. They all wanted waffles. Miss Annie Mae would scarcely let me touch any of the food. She delivered drinks to the table, and when my husband arrived she fixed him breakfast from the hot bar.

As other guests entered, she greeted them and treated them as graciously as she treated us.

I told my seven-year-old to take her plate to the trash, and Miss Annie Mae marched her right back to the table. “Miss Annie Mae will take that for you,” she said.

I was effectively immobilized. Currents of history swirled around Miss Annie Mae, my daughter, and me. I remembered returning to Mississippi for my grandmother’s funeral in the nineties and Pearlie, who had worked for different family members for decades, serving in her starched white maid’s uniform at the after-funeral lunch. My great-uncle chuckled at my obvious discomfort. I thought of my recent reading of The Help, a bestseller about maids in Mississippi in the 1960s, and remembered the description of a black maid training her daughter how to serve. Someone had taught Miss Annie Mae how to serve, and to do it with remarkable grace.

On the mantel in the dining room there were cards--thank you notes to Miss Annie Mae from hotel guests. This woman, in a town that once saw the worst of racial discrimination, demanded to serve us all, black and white. At a job where her duties were simply to prepare the food and keep the room relatively clean, she gave five-star service. Miss Annie Mae made the budget hotel dining room her domain, a home where others were more important than herself and excellent quality ruled over stereotypes.

My children were too young to recognize Miss Annie Mae’s extraordinary work ethic; but we talked about her after we checked out, trying to make them understand and emulate the gracious spirit that treated others far above herself. We seldom see such an example of service, but Annie Mae excelled us all. Would that there were more Annie Maes among us.

For Parents to Consider:

How do you teach your children Aibileen's mantra?

“Kindness don’t have no boundaries”