Review: The Help

I picked up The Help in the departures lounge over the holiday season, slightly sceptical about a book written by a white woman about the lives of domestic servants in the Deep South. I mean what could she really know right? Her parents hired black domestics and I remembered watching Sarafina- my prejudice was against this book and I bought it against my better judgment. I had just spent almost half of my allocated spending money on two dresses in the sale at French Connection and a pair of shoes (not in the sale) at LK Bennett and thought that a good, interesting book would lure me away from the shops. Not really, I still managed to buy an ill fitting suit at Ted Baker (returned) and spent most of my time stroking the Mulberry Bayswater in patent leather (wish list). I digress- needless to say The Help lay unopened in the bottom of my travel bag. I finally picked it up on my commute and I was so glad that I gave it a chance.

It is easy in the whirling maelstrom of the election of Barack Obama, to remember that life was awfully different only a short time ago. It was only fifty years ago that black domestic servants were not allowed to live in the same quarters or areas as their bosses and had segregated facilities, it was less than 4 decades ago that lots of young black men were killed and their murders were never investigated, and that based on the colour of their skins black people were not allowed in the halls of any of the finest educational establishments.

The storyline of The Help is simple enough. A young white fledgling writer decides to compile an anonymous book about the lives of black maids- there is no great suspense, no grand denouement, no thick coded sub plot. Sure, there are the narrator’s dalliances with dating a politician’s son, the mystery of the lost maid (Constantine), and the characterisations of the rich southern elite women are not anything far from the expected and ordinary.

Kathryn Stockett delicately chronicles the experience of Abileen, Minny and her friends who worked in the grand houses of the landed families of the Deep South with dignity, and without the pathos of looking through the lenses of the situation after the fact. Kathryn uses Skeeter to tell these stories: she is an internal dissident and a woman on the borders of the bridge playing, ball attending, handbag toting, curler wearing Southern Society who herself is asserting and climbing her own mountains to establish herself as a writer in a male dominated environment. Confined to writing a column about cleaning- a servant’s domain, she is metaphorically the “servant” of her career, or at least treading the lower echelons and she is therefore well poised, given her sensibilities, to be the appointed narrator of the days of the lives of the maids.

There are stereotypes in this book. Abileen is the warm, gentle, bible-reading, “praying-for-neighbours”, long suffering “Mamie” who likes caring for white babies as her own, only to see them eventually become the image of their dreadful parents. Minny is the sassy black women with attitude who can’t hold down a job because she likes to talk back. Most of the white women in the book are portrayed as self- serving – their galas for the Poor Starving Children of Africa are put on to endear them to the communities of Jackson whilst their contempt for the poor starving children of Jackson is reprehensible. It might be possible to argue that the premise of the book is objectionable- the black voices need to be filtered via a white voice to be heard. Isn’t this virtually endorsing the status quo and noblesse oblige?

However the stereotypes do not permeate the ethos of the effort, and the result is a gently rollicking novel full of convincing dialogue and storylines which brings home the reality of segregation in the Deep South. The two maid characters show the struggles of the black woman against the backdrop of the precursors to the Civil Rights Movement- the marginalisation of men, children who are made to grow up too fast without educations and who follow in the footsteps of their mamas serving and waiting and sons who are constantly under threat from either being killed or blinded (metaphysically) by the establishment. The collard green diets of the working poor contrast against the cakes, sponges and sandwiches of the upper class families they served. Their grand houses are set against the cramped hovels of the maids. The devil is in the detail. Medgar Evers, a neighbour, is gunned down. Mae Mobley plays “back of the bus” pretending to be Rosa Parks. And there is coverage on the television about a Martin Luther King- Abileen is amazed that over ten thousand of the marchers were white.

Stockett’s debut book has been questioned on the basis of whether it is legitimate that a white writer should assume and appropriate the dialect of the Southern blacks, and whether she has the mandate to genuinely tell their stories. She admits that she struggled with whether she would be able to do the book justice in crossing that invisible line in narrating in the voice of a black person. Only the black women in 1962 would be able to tell whether or not it is accurate. What The Help does, however, is to relate the stories of human beings at the outer margins of society, gracefully and with compassion and from that perspective it is an astounding success.