- The Help
- Putnam, 464 pp.
- CLR Rating:
Mississippi Slow Burning
Hattie McDaniel, the Academy-Award winning actress who played Mammy in Gone with the Wind reportedly once said: “Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making $7 a week being one.”
Of course, she didn’t have much of a choice. For McDaniel in Hollywood, like many black women throughout the United States, the only role that white folks would accept her in was a domestic one. Mammy was expected to be chief bottle washer, maid, cook, and helpmeet. She could tell outlandish stories, sing spirituals or drop pearls of wisdom – that was part of her “character” – but speaking her true mind was out. She was, to all intents and purposes, the invisible woman.
The story of these unseen women forms the basis of Kathryn Stockett’s entertaining and problematic novel, The Help. Entertaining in that it is a yarn well spun, a tale of women’s lives that has its antecedents in books like the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or The Joy Luck Club. Full of plot twists and sly humor, The Help is what you might call an old-fashioned page turner.
Problematic in that this page turner is set in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s, and is told from three points of view. Skeeter, an educated and prosperous young woman with no real plans for the future, is white. Aibileen and Minny, the titular help who reveal their stories, are black.
Now this, on the face of it, should not be a problem. Toni Morrison was happy to speak in the voice of white people in her recent book A Mercy and reviewers, including this one, were happy to accept the premise. There are no rules in novels (critics have fun superimposing those later).
And if you’re going to focus on the closeted, almost harem-like world of women in Jackson during the Kennedy years, choosing to speak with the voices of those who see all and hear all and ostensibly say nothing seems like a good choice.
Yet when an author treads into specific territories, the ground becomes awfully muddy. We’re happy to let writers play around with being a Roman slave of the first century or a prostitute of the eighteenth, but when it comes to depicting a person who has lived through the Holocaust or the Civil Rights era, ah, then I think we hesitate. Does an author, even in the services of fiction, have a right to appropriate these stories?
Stockett is smart enough to know she will be asked this question, and she tackles it in a number of ways. For one, she starts and finishes The Help with Aibileen’s narrative. Aibileen is middle-aged and without family – she lost a grown son to an industrial accident – but has raised seventeen white children as part of her duties. Maternal by nature, she nonetheless retains a dry sense of wit about her former charges:
And how I told him don’t drink coffee or he gone turn colored. He say he still ain’t drunk a cup of coffee and he twenty-one years old. It’s always nice seeing the kids grown up fine.
Aibileen works for Miss Leefolt, taking care of her daughter, Mae Mobley, and spends most of her time silently shielding the fat little girl from her mother’s verbal abuse.
Her friend Minny, on the other hand, has no problem with speaking her mind. Mother of five and married to an abusive drunk who works the night shift, Minny is known around Jackson as the best cook in the city and the one with the biggest mouth. If you can hear the theme tune of Gone With the Wind playing, Stockett can too:
If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress.
After insulting the queen bee of the white hive, Miss Hilly, Minny is cast out from society, eventually ending up in the employment of a scatterbrained “white-trash” Miss Celia.
Between them, Aibileen and Minny have seen a lifetime of trouble and amusement, enough to fill a library. But Stockett leaves it up to Miss Skeeter to put the plot in motion. An aspiring writer, she decides to make her reputation by secretly interviewing black maids and compiling the experiences into one book. Maybe that will be her ticket to New York.
This being Mississippi at the height of segregation, library sit-ins and NAACP assassinations, complications invariably ensue. Miss Hilly, head of the Junior League and a filthily polite racist, begins to suspect Skeeter of radical notions and sets out to gun her and her conspirators down. This isn’t an idle threat. Though a white man’s fist hurts, Aibileen notes, a white woman’s slander has the power to destroy lives:
No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches’ fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.
It takes a great deal of wit and will to combat Miss Hilly – toilets feature prominently in this battle – even as all three narrators must continue to deal with their regular lives. A Marilyn Monroe look-alike loses her mind, a handsome boyfriend appears and disappears, and personal tragedies loom. A grand finale is needed to tie up all these threads, and that’s what is delivered (if a trifle too conveniently in a couple of instances).
Amidst all this hoopla, Stockett explicitly, some might say obviously, points out the narrators’ widening awareness of the larger world. She has Aibileen reading seminal books by black Americans, Skeeter growing her hair long, and Minny dealing with domestic violence.
Yet when it comes to Skeeter’s true dilemma – whether she is exploiting others for personal gain – Stockett chooses to nick the surface and move on. She is certainly careful to have Gretchen, a young maid, accuse Skeeter outright:
Another white lady trying to make a dollar off of colored people.
But it is an accusation that is never thoroughly investigated. Gretchen lasts all of a page before Aibileen firmly steps in to contradict such a notion. Similarly, to bolster Skeeter’s case, over the course of the novel Stockett ensures that her white woman becomes more of a transcriber than a writer, with the maids often dictating or typing their own stories for her to edit. They will share the profits at the end; Skeeter will merely be the enabler.
Ay, there’s the rub. For as much as The Help is a rollicking read, I still come back to the uneasy feeling that Skeeter, for all her awkward bumbling, is the narrator who truly frames the novel. Unsurprisingly, her story seems the most personal and the most convenient, the one most like Stockett’s life. Like Stockett, she grows up in Jackson and goes off to New York to make her fortune. And, like Stockett, she has the final edit on the narratives of others. Now I have never lived in the south, so I cannot answer to the truth of Aibileen and Minny’s voices and experiences. I can wonder, though, how black women of 1962 would respond to this 21st century version of themselves.
Is Minny with her outlandish catchphrases just another version of Mammy, updated for more sensitive times? Even if stories haven’t been told, is it fair for an outsider to tell them? What would Hattie McDaniel, who worked as that $7 maid before making it to Hollywood, think of this book?
These may not be fair questions to ask of a novel that sets out to entertain and does so with great panache, but, being a dour reviewer, I’ll ask them anyway.
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February 9th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Hi Elinor Teele–
I appreciated reading your well-written and thought-provoking review.
“Even if stories haven’t been told, is it fair for an outsider to tell them?” Intriguing question. Of course, Harriett Beecher Stowe, New Englander or not, told of Uncle Tom’s ordeal to good effect.
For this writer, the question becomes how well the writer tells the story,and to what effect. My understanding of the review is that “The Help” is purely for entertainment; by no means a bad thing. In looking for levity as opposed to serious history or social commentary, Kathryn Stockett is given a broad playing field indeed.
Best Regards,
John R. Guthrie
February 15th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
LET’S ASK MINNY:
Elinor, first of all let me begin by saying that I truly enjoyed reading this review as you raised some interesting questions, but I would be remiss if I didn’t respond. As a black woman, I am thrilled that Kathryn Stockett, a white woman, had the courage to tell the stories. She crafted complex, strong, moral, loyal and need I say it, intelligent women, in Minny and Aibileen. Usually in literature, black women are relegated to being one dimensional, stereotypical characters: all nurturing, asexual, or completely invisible servants. So, I applaud her for at least giving these women emotional depth.
Second, you question the veracity of Minny or Aibileen’s voices. This tells me that you have not spent much time in the south, because any one who has, will surely feel the authenticity of these characters and their circumstances. I can state emphatically that Minny was my mother. She was an opinionated, strong, hardworking, sassy, progressive, MAID,
Finally, I think you posed the question, ‘what gives her the right to tell these stories, in the voice that she chose.’ My response to that is simple, she’s human. My interpretation of the story is that we are all human. What better way to demonstrate that than taking America back in time to an ugly part of her history, and showing through the experiences of these provocative characters that beautiful, human side. A writer needn’t be black or white to tell these stories, just truthful.
Kathryn Stockett should be lauded for writing brave characters in a time where bravery came at the ultimate price.
February 19th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Hi John and Octavia,
Thanks for the comments! They’re all part of a debate that interests me as a writer (as opposed to a reviewer)- how do we get at the truth of another person’s experiences? Do the best stories come from one’s own life or a sympathetic imagining of another’s? I don’t have any answers for these questions, but I wanted to throw the ideas into the mix with my review. I also want to reiterate that I really enjoyed Stockett’s writing and mention (third to last paragraph) that I included the caveat that I’ve never lived in the South.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:50 am
“The Help” which takes place during the civil rights era gives witness to a unique transcendance that occurred during this period and the three main characters reinforce that story. The contradictions of southern bigotry and class as related to domestic help represented by these characters brought back so many memories. The mixed messages that those of us raised by black women witnessed are all there. The nurturing and genuine nature of these relationships defies all reasonableness and belief given the bigotry and hatred of the time, which is probably why the validity of these characters is questionned. Even as children, we knew as Mae Mobley and Skeeter did that this love defied what was the norm. It was not present with all families, there were many black and white who felt the need to be separate, which is evident in Minny’s Mother’s instructions to her about how to be a maid. The change these black women, portrayed as Aibileen and Constantine, made in the hearts of their charges has been beautifully expressed and was a source of pride for many former maids. I, too, knew how many others had been raised before me and how much they were loved. The book celebrates this transcendance and I thank Kathryn for understanding the contradictions.
August 23rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Last I heard stealing was the act of taking and depriving someone of something they owned.
It’s ridiculous to accuse a fiction writer of stealing someone else’s narrative – the act of owning your imagination does not deprive anyone else of their own.
If writers are not allowed to explore the viewpoints of others unlike themselves how poor the genre would be. And what kind of intellectual fascism is that?
Kathryn Stockett isn’t proclaiming to write *on behalf* of black people in Mississippi and naturally the story that is closest to her own is going to be the richest. Rare is the writer who could do otherwise.
When I see these kinds of accusations it makes me think that the writer is angry at themselves for not writing the story, of not having their thoughts represented. Have at it.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:14 am
Kathryn Sockett is a white woman who grew up in the South with black help. As long as no one thinks it’s anything other than a privileged white woman’s take on what it must have been like to be black domestic help among privileged white people, then there’s no debate. However, what I hear in my small Southern town (from the privileged white women who are buying this book) is what a great thing Stockett has done for the voice of the black maid–and that’s about as deep as it gets. What I hear is “We really DID love our maid, Eddie Mae, and she LOVED us–she took CARE of us!!” and “We have always been so GOOD to our help–we give them so many extras!” My favorite line is “You better watch out–your help really KNOWS more than you think.” It’s just a story–no more than a beach read, and not a very good one at that. The fact that this book has gotten so much ink as a serious work of fiction is appalling. It is poorly written, embarrassingly trite, and condescending to literate people. I’m not a writer, so to the person who sent the email above, I am far from jealous! I am embarrassed–as an avid reader and as a Southerner, that anyone thinks that narrative has any historic merit. If The Help turns out to be a jumping off point for the REAL story of what it was like to be black in Mississippi in the 60’s–well, then that would make it worth something.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:43 am
I LOVED LOVED LOVED this book!
I enjoyed all the characters and story lines.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
THE HELP has been recommended to me by many friends whose opinions and tastes I normally share. I must admit, however, that I am having lots of problems with this book. Primarily I think Stockett’s use of African American dialect is overused and inaccurate. Skilled writers can give readers a flavor of dialect by using it carefully and judiciously. A writer doesn’t have to render every speech by a character as precisely and phonetically as that character would speak. Besides, I don’t think she is particularly precise. I taught for many years in the South in a school whose population was quite diverse. I never heard an African American student say, for example, “pneumonia” when he/she meant “ammonia.” Many native Southerns say “I shoulda told the truth,” rather than the more careful and precise, “I should have told the truth” or even “I should’ve told the truth,” not just African Americans, but I soon wearied of Stockett’s consistent and overuse of “a” for “have” and “of” in rendering the thoughts and speech of her black characters. Also, I found it careless on Stockett’s or her editors’ part that she consistently spells “all right” as “alright.” Few careful writers (unless you have the status of a Cormac McCarthy) use this unconventional spelling. These are “nit picking” matters. More important, I believe, are some of the deep-seated issues that Teele addresses in her review.
October 10th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I loved this story and am so glad it was told. I am looking forward to the discussion at my book club next month.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:15 am
After reading the book The Help, I found this a very moving book. Of how White America treated the Black people. Some treated them well, others did not.
I remember having been born in 1954, some of the things spoken of in this book and how black’s were treated.
It takes lots of courage for Kathryn Stockett to write a moving novel.
Even though it doesn’t say much for us the white folk whom treated Blacks the way they did, but the truth needs to told.
And it lets us know, no matter what color we are we are still His children, and we should treat everyone alike.
Thank you for writing the book Kathryn Stockett.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I find the reviews quite interesting. I’m a white woman, raised in Mount Airy, a racially integrated Philadelphia neighborhood, at a time when integrated meant, “separated by the train tracks.” I was immediately uncomfortable with the dialect in which Aibileen tells her story. It feels forced. And, I was uncomfortable with the fact that this is a white author telling the story of “The Help.” I always grapple with this issue–when a woman tries to tell a man’s story; or a man, a woman’s. This is what literature does, right? It allows us to enter another reality…and I think that goes for the author as well as the reader. Still, I’m uncomfortable. And, two chapters in, I have the sense that there will be little that isn’t predictable, and few sentences I’d be captured by. I still think the topic is important, and I like the fact that a white author took it on.
When I was three, a black caretaker that my mother employed one day a week to take care of me while she spent the day shopping, had a heart attack while I was napping. I remember climbing over her body to sit on my potty seat. She pulled herself into my brothers’ room but wouldn’t lie down on the bed. “Mrs. McVeigh, I’d never lay down on your bed,” my mom later told me she said. My mother was horrified, but clearly she hadn’t done enough to contradict the notion that this wasn’t acceptable. The woman’s name was India. She was carried down the stairs and put in an ambulance. She died the next day. It is perhaps my earliest memory and still affects my own story about race and injustice. So…I want to like this book, to find something resonant in it. I’ll try to stick with it, but I’m looking for more than a “good read” or a “beach book” (spare me). I’d just love to hear this story from another perspective.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:44 am
How can an English major, author of a best selling book consistantly misspell “all right?” I am reading THE HELP and I cringe every time I read “alright.”
October 18th, 2009 at 10:47 am
P.S. Maybe Kathryn Stockett should have majored in English at Ole Miss!!! :)
October 20th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
I read this book and believe me, I could not get enough of it; couldn’t wait to read it and was sad to see it end. I have not read a book this good in quite some time. First of all, this book is written as fiction, so there is nothing specific on which to base a lot of the details other than the experience upon which the author has drawn to tell the story. Having said that, there are many historical events in the book that are told with accuracy relative to the socio-economic climate of that time, specifically in the south. For those who question the language used by some of the characters as inaccurate, I would venture to say they have never lived in the south, and perhaps never had any relationships with others who have strong southern roots. I lived in the south as a child for a few years and based on my recollection, nothing in the dialogue(s) seems far-fetched to me.
It is unbelievable to me that anyone feels a white woman cannot tell the story of black women, which I believe in and of itself, is a statement that perpetuates an element of racism. Skeeter had a unique sense of compassion and understanding of the women with whom she wrote her book in this story. She was dealing with her own issues; a white woman, and privileged at that. However, she was living her life in a world in which she did not feel comfortable, let alone accepted. She did not fit into the circle of friends that she was expected to be a part of and eventually, she was a social outcast because of views she was suspected to carry; because she was an individual not inclined to follow the Queen Bee . . . Ms. Hilly . . . which is more than can be said for the other women in that circle of “friends”. These are the mean girls that grow up to be mean women; judge every book by its cover, and in the case of this story, particularly by the color of one’s skin. Also, in spite of her attraction to and desire to be with Stuart, Skeeter was true to herself and to the women on whose behalf she completed the book, which makes her the perfect story-teller; likewise for the author of this book, who reflected on her own personal experiences to write “The Help”.
For those who don’t just want a “good read” or a “beach book” perhaps “Anna Karenina” or “War & Peace” would be a good choice.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Thanks to all who have commented thus far since I am still
thinking thinking thinking after finishing The Help at 2:00 am. Your questions and comments are helpful as I continue to process. I am not an English major.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Like many, I stayed up late at night reading The Help as its description as a “real page turner” is extremely accurate.
Interesting though, that Kathryn Stockett did not include any young, educated middle class white women, Skeeter’s age, in Jackson MI who weren’t in the Junior League. There were plenty of these women and many of them were interested in the Civil Rights Movement and social equality. But they weren’t “Junior League Material” because they didn’t have the status, money or correct religion. I know, because I was one of these women. I watched the “Skeeters” float by at the country club and not give the non-Junior Leaguers the time of day. Why did I get the feeling Skeeter did this even after she was blackballed by her friends?
Unfortunately, though Skeeter is woken up to the injustices of the south, she isn’t enlightened enough to consider that her own white social class system excludes people and makes them feel “less” than they are because they don’t come from cotton or money.
If there was any reason why I moved to CA in my twenties it was to get away from these kinds of white women.
I enjoyed The Help and it brought back many memories of the South. Just wish Stockett could have taken Skeeter’s revelation one step further.
October 26th, 2009 at 8:15 am
I had a hard time getting through this read and felt the majority of the characters were over-the-top cookie cutter stereotypes. I couldn’t help but get an image of the bourbon drinking Senator wearing a white suit just like Colonel Sanders, going down to the Robert E. Lee hotel with his dog named “Dixie” in tow.
As far as the majority of the characters..
“Those that were good, were very, very good…and those that were bad were horrid.” Though the author is trying to portray the mood of a nation near the height of the Civil Rights movement, I get a twinge of collective guilt coming off the pages as I read them…which was perhaps intended.
Too bad this piece wasn’t written in the 1960s. It is fictional bravery at best, although the concept is interesting, it is safe…and blessed by Oprah.
I think I noticed about three references from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but this one is just a summer read with nothing too subtle about it…so I’m betting there’s a movie screenplay not too far behind.
The thing that got me is that Skeeter ends up cutting out to New York City for a new life…and everyone else is left to fend for themselves in Jackson and clean up the mess.
I did finish the book for our book club discussion. If anything… the discussion will be lively, so that says something!
October 26th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
I sit here wondering, truly wondering, what Kate would consider the “REAL story of what it was like to be a black woman living in the south” in the 60s. Apparently, Kate DOES know – and this is not it. She knows so well that this book is simply “appalling” to her. Well I’m dying to hear it!
Also having grown up in the South, I can’t for the life of my figure out what is so obviously and grotesquely wrong with KS’s characters’ POVs. Maybe they’re not accurate – I’M certainly not a black women who worked for a white family in the 60s so I couldn’t say. (And if you’re going to go THERE, why is a white woman sitting around criticizing other white women in defense of the “truths” of black women? Come on, Kate!) But “The Help” rang a bell with me, and while these are fictional characters so there is no “truth” or “non-truth” to what they felt, this book enabled me think about their real-life counterparts’ POVs in a more more intimate way than I ever had before and, I think, exactly the way I believe KS wanted.
I particularly loved that the relationships with the maids and the families were indeed complex. I didn’t find them at 2-dimentional. There was both love and hate all mixed together, and I got that. Seems pretty realistic to me.
But apparently, as someone also “from the South who reads avidly” [paraphrase] I should think this book was a mortifying shame if I want to be legitimate. I wish Kate would fill me in on what I don’t know about either identification.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:47 am
For Heaven’s sake, people, this was an extremely good book!….I, too, was sorry to see it end, even if it was a sad commentary about those times….which are, unfortunately, not that different today in Sikeston, Missouri (more cotton and money, a few hours north of Jackson, Mississippi). The vernacular was right on, and, good grief…NONE of us (not down here, anyway) says “all right”…Ole Miss English major or not…
Here’s what Merriam-Webster online has to say about it…
Main Entry: al·right
Pronunciation: \(?)o?l-?r?t, ?o?l-?\
Function: adverb or adjective
Date: 1887
The one-word spelling alright appeared some 75 years after all right itself had reappeared from a 400-year-long absence. Since the early 20th century some critics have insisted alright is wrong, but it has its defenders and its users. It is less frequent than all right but remains in common use especially in journalistic and business publications. It is quite common in fictional dialogue, and is used occasionally in other writing .
Bravo for this book!
Anne Berbling
November 1st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I am a black woman whose mother grew up in Mississippi and migrated to Chicago in the 60’s before I was born. I also have many relatives who lived Mississippi during the time period Ms Stockett writes of in “The Help”. That said I did not find the lanquage over the top or the situations unrealistic. From all that I know and have heard I feel Ms Stockett was honest and brave. I may be wrong but most of the comments seem to be from white educated people who do not have an idea ofwhat life was like there in that time in history. I am listening to the book and I am thoroughly entertained as well as saddened and intriqued. Thank Ms Stockett for a wonderfully experience.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Having grown up a middle-class white girl in a small southern town in the mid-sixties, I was bowled over by this novel in sometimes troubling and complex ways. The voices of Abileen and Minnie were echoes of the lovely voices of the black women who helped raise me. Skeeter had a narrative in this book too. Some of us did, in fact, have our “consciousnesses raised” in the late sixties to use a shamefully trite phrase. The nature of life in that time and place is difficult to explain to those who didn’t live it. Ms. Stockett does a masterful job. This is a story worth telling and I hope other writers both black and white will try.
November 17th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I am 74 years old. I remember the 60s well. I have spent 10 years living with black people in both Oakland and Los Angeles. The voices of Kathryn Stockett’s women are authentic and right. Much of the horror of the Civil Rights movement is told. I loved the book.