“I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns … But the help always knows.”
“Don’t waste your time on the obvious things. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
“They say it’s like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime.”
I didn’t know too much about “The Help,” but when it was recommended and described to me, I quickly fell in love with concept and the story. Using the language and idiom of the times (early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi), this book described the lives of black help and their uneasy, disparate relationships with the white women who turned over child-rearing, homekeeping and family culture duties to them.
The accents felt a bit forced at times and were initially awkward to read, but quickly developed in rhythm and readability as the story progressed. Also, there was a change in narrators every couple of chapters, an intriguing approach which helped to bring the story along and assisted with pacing. The first-person narrative worked well, with only a single chapter in the middle of the book employing a third-person observer.
“There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.” -- Howell Raines, “Grady’s Gift”
“But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me.”
This novel was the first written by Kathryn Stockett, making the character-building and storytelling all the more amazing. She swiftly and adeptly sketched memorable, multidimensional characters such as the tough, outspoken, vulnerable and hilarious Minny (“If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper.”); the wise, intelligent, serious Aibileen; the disturbed, unaware, pitiable, Marilyn Monroe-ish Celia; the evil, unapologetic, irredeemable Hilly; and the guarded, brave, conflicted Skeeter (“All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”). In this female-dominated tale, these women and others shed light in various ways on the uneasy relationship between the factions of civil rights-era Mississippi.
“Aibileen, she moves on to another job when the babies get too old and stop being color-blind. We don’t talk about it.”
“Things ain’t never gone change in this town, Aibileen. We living in hell, we trapped. Our kids is trapped.”
“The Help” is dominated by the complex, give-and-take relationships between many of the key protagonists: Aibileen and her employer’s little girl, Mae Mobley; Skeeter and Aibileen; Aibileen and Minny; Minny and Hilly; Skeeter and Hilly; Minny and her alcoholic, abusive husband Leroy; Skeeter and her mother; Minny and Celia; Skeeter and Stuart, her prospective boyfriend; and others. To me, there was much beautiful about the relationship between Aibileen and Mae Mobley, which really propelled the beginning and ending of the entire book; it served as a fitting representation of the conflicting emotions that defined white vs. black and help vs. employer during this era.
“ … that’s when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day? … What if I don’t even get to tell Mae Mobley goodbye, and that she a fine girl, one last time?
“Lord, I pray, if I have to leave her, give her somebody good.”
“I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. A flash from the future. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full-grown woman.
“And then she say it, just like I need her to. ‘You is kind,’ she say, ‘you is smart. You is important.’”
“And I think about all my friends, what they done for me. What they do ever day for the white women they waiting on. That pain in Minny’s voice. Treelore dead in the ground. I look down at Baby Girl, who I know, deep down, I can’t keep from turning out like her mama. And all of it together roll on top a me. I close my eyes, say the Lord’s prayer to myself. But it don’t make me feel any better.
“Law help me, but something’s gone have to be done.”
Without giving too much away, the story really finds its stride when Skeeter decides to covertly write a book about the life and times of black help in Mississippi, enlisting the help of Aibileen, who turns out to be a bit of a closet writer and literature lover. In developing a code and a cautious relationship, Skeeter and Aibileen both grow individually by leaps and bounds, at the same time forging an incredible, under-described bond through their tension-filled, secretive emotional efforts. In their collaborations, each assists the other in truly finding their voices, as well as the inner confidence needed to come to terms with and repair previous wounds and scars. We are witness to Skeeter finding her sexuality and femininity as she is guarding her secret and losing all of her friends, forced to ponder the metaphor of her falling in love at a hotel named for the representation of pro-slavery Civil War feelings.
There are emotional, touching scenes, such as when the maids quietly pass by Skeeter and quietly pledge to help her; and when the churchgoers present a signed secret book to Aibileen, and later to Skeeter; and when Minny lets down her façade long enough to help Celia deal with her hidden secret (“She stops crying and I don’t have any good things left to say. For a minute, we’re just two people wondering why things are the way they are.”). “The Help” does a respectable job of handling the daunting task of depicting and describing the tangled web of racial relationships that exist in every nook and cranny within this book.
“It’s something about that word truth. I’ve been trying to tell white women the truth about working for them since I was fourteen years old.”
“Truth.
“It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life.
“Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling.”
That’s not to say there weren’t some struggles and holes in this work. There are massive holes in Skeeter’s relationship with Stuart, stemming from the fact that it is quite apparent that he is still in love with his ex-fiancee and likes Skeeter only for the fact that she is the anti-ex -- a safe, nice girl who is just ugly enough to where she wouldn’t and couldn’t cheat on him. Also, the placement of the novel within historical perspective feels a trifle forced at times, with timely references to Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the Rolling Stones and John F. Kennedy peppered throughout. I also couldn’t help wondering why Skeeter wouldn’t travel with the completed book herself to New York to ensure it arrived at its destination, and also to make multiple copies while there to ensure there was some insurance involved.
And finally, the ending was an enormous letdown after the stellar job of building weighty, impressive intensity -- creating the perception that you’re tiptoeing around Jackson with the lead characters, ducking the trouble that lurks around every corner -- throughout the ending of the book. It was disappointing to read the lack of profundity involved in the conclusion, though I guess there is an aspect to it that could be read as the recognition that this book wasn’t going to immediately cause any changes and that mundane life would simply go on. But I still felt there was a lost opportunity there.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered the claimed opportunity and the true ending on the other side of the acknowledgements. In a small section titled “Too Little, Too Late,” Stockett describes her early life, her growth under the help of her family’s live-in help, Demetrie -- and essentially, the fact that she is Skeeter, as well as her reasons for undertaking “The Help.” This represented the beautiful ending, after all, but it was tucked away in the back of the book, and so many people stop reading at the acknowledgements. How many people missed that part of the book that really tied everything together, the nominal Lebowski’s rug of the novel?
“Finally, my belated thanks to Demetrie McLorn, who carries us all out of the hospital wrapped in our baby blankets and spent her life feeding us, picking up after us, loving us, and, thank God, forgiving us.”
Yet, assessed in its totality, “The Help” is a memorable, brave work, a promising and head-turning debut for Stockett. No matter where you’re from and what you believe about civil rights, it will forever change the way you look at racial relationships within not only the South, but the entire country.
And for a first-time novelist, that is a truly, truly staggering accomplishment.
“I’m pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn’t something people felt compelled to examine.
“I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I’ve spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.”
“Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
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