It’s 1962 Mississippi and racial tensions are high. The Help revolves around three women – two of them are black servants and the third is a white woman, the daughter of wealthy parents who is recently returned from graduating college to discover that her parents former black domestic help, a woman who virtually raised her, has disappeared. And no one will tell her where she has gone.
We start with Aibileen, a black maid who has raised seventeen children including one of her own. Her current employment is with Mrs Elizabeth Leefolt, looking after “Miss Leefolt’s” 2yo daughter Mae Mobley and performing domestic tasks such as cleaning, cooking, the shopping, polishing the silver, etc. Aibileen is grieving the loss of her only natural child, an intelligent young man with a future ahead of him who died on his job working for white men. Mae Mobley suffers from a mother with lack of interest in her and the bulk of her care falls to Aiblieen, who teaches her everything she needs to know, provides her with all her love and affection. Although Miss Leefolt is not the worst of employers, Aibileen is insulted when Miss Leefolt is talked into building Aibileen her own bathroom by one of her society friends who doesn’t with to use the same facilities at Miss Leefolt’s house as Aibileen. But this is segregation and most whites believe that the diseases black people carry are passed on by sharing things such as toilets and that whites don’t have immunity to them.
Aibileen’s close friend Minny is a pocket rocket. She worked for an elderly white lady but has recently lost her job (one of many, as Minny is known for speaking her mind and not exactly keeping her opinions to herself and everyone knows the white ladies don’t like that sort of thing) as the ladies daughter is putting her into care. Minny finds that attempting to get a new job in their town is almost impossible after The Terrible Thing that she did – the ladies daughter, the society ringleader Hilly Holbrook is badmouthing her all over town. She finally gets a break (through Aibileen) with Celia Foote, a woman who is as much an outcast in society as Minny herself.
Finally there’s Skeeter (not her real name, but it stuck) the white woman who is looking for her family’s former servant who has disappeared without a trace. Her mother says that she quit but Skeeter doesn’t believe that and knows that she would never have done so without telling Skeeter. She also finds herself offended by some of the going’s on in her town, especially Hilly Holbrook’s scheme to have all domestics using their own toilets to prevent the spread of disease. Skeeter wants to be a writer and she finds herself receiving advice from someone who works in publishing to tackle a real issue. So she approaches Aibileen first of all, to talk about what it is like to be a black woman working for a white woman. At first Aibileen is reluctant but eventually she finds herself eager to talk after the bathroom debacle.
It starts off small, just Aibileen telling her story, which she finds easier to write down in her own time and then read out. But eventually Aibileen finds more people that are interested, starting with her outspoken friend Minny. As the tensions escalate in the local area and a young black man is brutally injured, more maids start to agree to talk and Skeeter has a book coming together on her hands. She works day and night to get it in before the deadline and then her dream comes true. It’s going to be published… but will the local ladies who lunch realise just exactly who the stories are? And what will be the repercussions for Skeeter and the maid’s who dared speak out?
The Help had some huge hype for some time. I must’ve read a couple dozen glowing reviews, it was heavily reviewed and talked about in national newspapers, in magazines, on the radio and television. I always held off on reading it because I thought that it wouldn’t be something I’d enjoy, but then I noticed a few people whose opinions tend to be similar to mine really liked it so I decided I might give it a go. My friend Mel borrowed a book off me a couple of months ago and in return, loaned me this one. It sat on my bookcase for a couple of months but then I began to think that probably I should get around to reading it sometime soon so I could return it.
I studied no history in school, other than compulsary year 7 and 8 Australian history which was pretty boring so I always have to admit to ignorance on a lot of things and the intricate details of racial segregation in southern America is one of those things. I know the bare bones, and although I’m aware that fiction books aren’t a great place to necessarily educate yourself, there’s enough truth in this book to give the uninitiated a bit of an idea as to what early 1960′s Mississippi was like. It was a bit of an eye-opener and reading it now it’s hard not to be horrified at the sort of things said about coloured people, like the diseases they were reputed to all carry that could be caught from doing such things as using a toilet that a coloured person had used. This is just forty-fifty years ago and people were thinking they could catch diseases from toilets and that coloured people had “special” diseases that would wreak havoc on a white person. It’s an amazing sort of theory really. And so outdated.
The Help is a really riveting sort of read – I read a few queries on a white person speaking in a black person’s voice but this didn’t bother me at all really. I would’ve found it weirder if there’d been no differentiating between the tone of the coloured maids and the white characters they worked for. The only thing I really could criticise in the book was that I felt the coloured maid characters were written a little too good. Aibileen is bordering on Sainthood and even the feisty Minny, who speaks her mind and tells people off, including those she works for, is more written as a ‘she tell it like those white ladies need to hear it and tough luck if they don’t be liking it’ sort of way. And even though some of the stories the coloured maids told were nice, a lot of them weren’t. So it always seemed like the characters were very black and white (ha, see what I did there). Which may be an accurate representation, who knows? But it came across a bit false at times, sometimes you had to think seriously, no one is that nice and that patient!
The Help is still an excellent book though. An amazing story written in an incredible three voices, the sort of book you read in an afternoon in one sitting. I don’t often watch movies (in fact, hardly ever, it’s something most people find pretty weird about me) but I am actually keen to see the movie version of this book. I think it would make a fantastic story on the big screen too and judging by some of the reviews coming out for it, it looks like it has.
8/10
Book #145 of 2011
