The Help (book review)

“The Help” is a novel well-deserving of the praise that’s been heaped upon it, praise that has made its 40-year old author Kathryn Stockett a household name. Its slow but steady success from the time it hit bookshelves in February of 2009 probably came as a great surprise to the author after 45 initial rejections from literary agents. To her exponentially growing readership, it will come as an even greater surprise that “The Help” is her first novel, a novel which to this day is holding at #2 after 54 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List for Hardcover Fiction and has 2 million copies currently in print. Only a handful of first-time authors have bragging rights of that magnitude.

The story is told from three different viewpoints: Aibileen, an aging and seasoned black housemaid coping with the death of her son; Minny, a young black housemaid known for her brashness; and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a white woman aspiring to be a journalist. It is the early 1960’s and all are residents of Jackson, Mississippi, the lion’s den of racial divide. Stockett takes us deep into the cultivated jungle of thought of her hometown: the beauty, the pride, the shame, the ignorance and the injustice, all coupled with the riveting backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.

Aibileen has worked for many families over the years, but the Leefolts seem to be the ones who test her patience the most, Elizabeth in particular. Spurned by whisperings of demonstrations and Elizabeth’s neglect of her 2-year old daughter Mae Mobley, Aibileen projects her deepest maternal instincts onto the girl in order to supplement the love she deserves, cope with the frustration she feels towards her employer and the agony of losing her own child.

Whereas Aibileen holds her tongue for fear and caution, her good friend Minny is a bluntly truthful woman that disguises the pain of an abusive husband with a clout that shocks her white employers. Along with the physical weight she hefts around is a sizeable chip on her shoulder, one that has her quick to judge, a temper even quicker to fire and the audacity to carry out what is consistently referred to as “The Terrible Awful” to the wrong person. In short order she is fired, slandered for her offense and every household she dares go to in Jackson turns her away. Hanging by the thinnest of threads, she finally gets a job and though she deems her employer one of the strangest women she’s ever worked for, she is unexpectedly taught a valuable lesson by her about the oversights of assumption.

Born and raised in the midst of this highly influential way of thinking, Skeeter manages to maintain a strong sense of liberalism and overwhelmed by Jackson’s demeaning societal tendencies becomes a mover and a shaker, giving black women a voice through a series of interviews she intends to publish:

Pg. 257, 258 - “The talk turns mundane at times, with complaints of low pay, hard hours, bratty children. But then there are stories of white babies dying in arms. That soft, empty look in their still blue eyes…There is undisguised hate for white women, there is inexplicable love…Angry stories come out, of white men who’ve tried to touch them…But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me. Most are invited to attend the white children’s weddings, but only if they’re in their uniforms. These things I know already, yet hearing them from colored mouths, it is as if I am hearing them for the first time.”

Through it all she is deeply moved by the stories told to her, bites her tongue at the intolerance of her white friends (in particular her best friend Hilly, the queen bee of Jackson’s social elite), bears the discomfort of being ostracized for her opinions and privately mourns her broken ties with Constantine, a beloved former maid in her household whose employment was mysteriously terminated before she came back home after graduating from college.

The book references real-life events, most notably the arrests of 300 Freedom Riders and the murder of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers. Tne New York Times called it a “button-pusher” and it’s easy to see why after the character Hilly (the antagonist of the book, one readers will find easy to hate) introduces a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” that Skeeter is coerced into including in the town circular that encourages Jackson residents to install separate bathrooms for the colored help. The rationalizations for such action are astonishing and offensive to the sensible person, the missive stating that

1) 99% of all colored diseases are carried in the urine
2) Whites can become permanently disabled by nearly all of these diseases because we lack immunities coloreds carry in their darker pigmentation
3) Some germs carried by whites can also be harmful to coloreds too

It concludes with an uncomfortably cheery end remark from Hilly that says “From the Holbrooks, we say, You’re welcome!” Something else that readers may find offensive is the “voice” Stockett uses for her black female characters, a voice that not only accounts for their deep South accents but their lack of higher education as well (“I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying and go in the toilet before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning”, pg. 1).

Most of the white female characters are so loathsome that it makes a white woman who reads this book squirm a bit. Having grown up in Jackson, Stockett can hardly be disputed about the ways in which she illuminates the city and the people she grew up with (she explained in an interview with Katie Couric that the thought processes of most Mississipians were virtually identical in the 60’s and then in the 70’s when she was born). What I find to be most enlightening is her “Too Little, Too Late” essay at the end of the novel, in particular the part where she reiterates a statement from Skeeter: “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.” Some might say that this statement, not to mention the novel being entirely in the point of view of female characters, gives the book a heavy feminist slant but I think Stockett fells this potential argument with a sound investment of history, common sense and sensibility.

Bottom line: A reviewer once said that “The Help” is an important book because it’s about something important. Few who read it will be unmoved by Stockett’s truthfulness, sensitivity and unique characters. With rave reviews from both professional critics and readers (not to mention nearly 2000 customer reviews on Amazon.com that are overwhelmingly positive), it’s easy to see why.