The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a moving novel about the early 1960s racial tension in Jackson, Mississippi. Having been born about that time and living in North Louisiana, I recall vividly the struggle between blacks and whites as desegregation swept the South. The Help though does not focus on the marches, the riots, the brutal clash in its most overt form, although all these are all present as a background to the scenes Stockett writes. What Stockett does achieve in near perfection is establishing the powerful, interpersonal relationships between the black women who work in homes and the white ladies of the house, their employers. Stockett depicts varying strands of these relationships, from ones of trust and love, albeit a rarer case, to the demeaning ones commonplace with the fictionalized Junior League contingency who raise funds for starving children in Africa but ignore the poverty just outside their neighborhood. The premise for the novel becomes one young, would-be journalist, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan's expose of the trials and tribulations of being the help. She enlists at first just one woman whose own story is sad, however typical. Later Abileen and her friend Minny convince others to join in telling their experiences of working in a white household. With a New York book publisher interested in the idea, Skeeter and the maids write their own revolution, ignited with the publication of their stories. The Southern employers are exposed for all their racist behaviors, and another powder keg is lit in the Deep South of 1962. I felt a powerful connection to this novel; I was, in fact, raised by a black woman, Pansy, who worked for my family for over 40 years. She was the kindest, most generous woman I have known. She had a deep, abiding faith in God, a contagious laugh and simply loved us all without limit. When she passed away, just a few months before my mother's own death, we were all bereft. Having lived 82 years in the South, picking cotton as a child, Pansy, I am sure, had stories of her own to tell. This novel has made me wish someone could tell them for her.