We are so fortunate to have well read staff members at our high school and we love to hear about what they are reading. Again, we have a guest blogger, Mrs. Pasha, who is a fabulous teacher and instructional coach with wonderful knowledge and insight. She has reviewed The Help by Kathyrn Stockett which is our staff book club coming up in October.
When I was very young, a local African American woman named Mildred helped my mother with housework, laundry, and cooking several days a week. My father, who was born and reared in New York City, demanded that Mildred sit and eat lunch with my parents. She steadfastly refused and instead sat on the steps to the back porch with her meal. (When it rained she consented to eat standing in the kitchen.) While my father took this behavior as odd and a bit insulting, my Arkansan mother understood that Mildred’s reluctance to associate with them was a result of a system that had kept the races confined to distinct roles. If Mildred had eaten at my parents’ dining table, she would have to behave as the help…when she ate on the back porch, she was able to be Mrs. Mildred Stance.
The Help is written by Kathryn Stockett, a native of Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is definitely a town with a strong southern history. It is the capital of Mississippi, the second state to secede from the Union in 1861. Fine antebellum homes line Fortification Street, so named for the row of Confederate defenses that ran through the middle of city. Huge magnolia trees grow along the roadways, and flower beds surround statues of southern Civil War generals in the downtown area. However, just a few streets away from all that grandeur is the poorer side of Jackson. Lines of tenement houses in various states of decay stand side by side with burned out stores and abandoned cars. It is easy to remember that this is the city that became the last stop for the Freedom Riders in 1961. (In May of that year, 300 activists were violently arrested for disturbing the peace when their buses stopped in Jackson; the group had hoped to make it to New Orleans as a protest in support of bus integration.) Jackson made national news again two years later when the leader of the Mississippi NAACP, Medgar Evers, was gunned down in front of his wife and children on June 12, 1963. (His white supremacist killer was tried several times and finally convicted of murder in 1994.) And on June 26, 2011, James Anderson, a 49 year old African American left his workplace at the end of his shift at a Jackson factory and was beaten to death by a group of white teenagers in what is now described as a “crime of hate”. For many, many years Jackson has been a racially charged place to live.
Stockett sets her story during some of the most volatile times in Jackson. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining support in many parts of the United States, most of the white citizens of Jackson fought to preserve what they saw as their “way of life”. African Americans were welcome in the homes of the wealthy (or want-to-be wealthy) in the roles of maid, laundress, cook, and nanny. However, as soon as the workday ended, the help were expected to get on their buses and go back to their side of town. The only thing greater than the geographic distance between the white and African American communities was the class line that divided the races. Both segments of society had a basic mistrust of the other---some of the white women worried that their maids might steal from and contaminate the homes that they cleaned, and the maids knew that they could be dismissed and possibly imprisoned on trumped up charges at any time. It was a time of great fear and suspicion for everyone.
The Help focuses on Aibileen, an intelligent and well read maid who has lost her only child but has served as nanny to seventeen white children. As a part of her current duties, she takes care of Mae Mobley, a little girl who apparently doesn’t quite live up to her mother’s idea of a good child. Aibileen’s attempt to provide Mae Mobley with a good self-image focuses on one of the underlying ideas of the book: white women will trust the help with their children but not with their silver. Aibileen’s best friend is Minnie, a maid known in Jackson as the best cook around. However, Minnie has a fatal flaw: her sassy attitude. Aibileen works for Elizabeth Leefolt, a nice but rather spineless member of Jackson’s Junior League, while Minnie initially works for Ms. Leefolt’s friend, Miss Hilly Holbrook. Miss Hilly is a vicious woman whose ambitions lead her to attempt to destructively manipulate the lives of friends, family, and, of course, employees. Rounding out this circle is Elizabeth and Hilly’s friend Eugenia, better known as Skeeter, a wealthy white woman who actually completed her journalism degree at Ole Miss, staying there long after her friends left school to marry and return to Jackson high society. Skeeter has come back to her family’s plantation outside Jackson after graduation only to find that her beloved childhood nanny, Constantine, has disappeared. Skeeter’s desire to be a journalist, as well as her need to know what happened to Constantine, drive her to begin a relationship with Aibileen and Minnie that falls outside the expectations of both the white and African American communities.
The Help is ultimately a story of profound loss and how the human spirit finds the strength to deal with such losses. It is about seeing the truth and somehow finding a voice to tell that truth. This story celebrates women of both races, strong southern women who nurture and protect each other as they discover the courage to face injustice and push against the norms of society.
I don’t often recommend books to my mother; she has very different reading preferences than I do. However, as soon as I finished reading this story, I passed it on to her. She read it in less than a day. (I think that my dad had to fix his own meals because she couldn’t put the book down.) As soon as she finished The Help, she called me, and we had one of those wonderful talks that I know I will remember for the rest of my life. We reminisced about our grandmothers, our aunts, and our friends as we remembered with great fondness all the women who played a part in making us the people we are today. --Mrs. M. Pasha
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