The Help, Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett (2009)

Sheila introduced the book with an explanation of the situation of segregation laws in the USA, where after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1864, “Jim Crow” laws in the Southern States still regulated racial segregation between black people (“Coloureds”) and white people, until the Civil Rights movements, led and personified by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parkes, resulted in their abolition by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The book is well written on the whole, though sometimes rather laborious. It was a real challenge getting used to the dialect of the Black characters. It made you feel you had got inside the skin of the American black women of the 1960s, with their permanent fear of losing their job, house, and family without any warning. They were only two or three generations on from the slaves. They still had no real freedom – their jobs and housing situations were extremely precarious and they could not vote. Apparently a film is being made of The Help, though some people considered that the time for such a film has really passed – it will not have the same effect as it would have done when its events were still in living memory.

There is a sharp divide between the Black characters in the book, who were all “good” (except Leroy), and the White characters, who were all “bad” (except Skeeter and, in a different way, Celia Foote). The fact is that the whole book focused on just one aspect: black women employed as “home helps” by white women; and in that situation, in the prevailing culture, that was how people acted. Because the set-up was so wrong, it had a bad effect on the white women who were part of it, and conformed to it. We noticed that Stockett could have introduced a “good” white woman in the person of the New York editor, as a white woman not involved in the racial segregation system; but she was Jewish, and so had a different culture of her own (stereotyped to some degree).

The characters are persuasive: full of life, and developing convincingly in the course of the book. Everyone liked Aibileen and Minny; they were strong characters, and the white children Aibileen brought up adored her. They had terrific humour, and good qualities – notably, loyalty to the people they worked for. However, it was felt to some extent that they were also stereotyped, and in that sense a little shallow.

Skeeter was felt, on the whole, to be incredibly naive, in that she risked getting the black women killed by interviewing them and publishing what they said. We discussed what was it that constituted the tipping-point for Aibileen, that made her agree to talk to Skeeter and then persuade the other “helps” to do the same, and realized it was Treelore’s death, plus of course the fact that having no husband or children of her own, she had less to lose than others.

One or two people found Celia Foote, the “poor white”, was their “favourite” character – she was excluded from the white social circle, so not part of the racial-segregation setup, and she didn’t have an ounce of malice in her – she was an “innocent” in every sense of the word. Some people found the relationship between her and her husband Johnny was weird.

Something particularly notable was the way the black women put their hearts into their work of home-making, even though the homes they made were other people’s. Minny was not only a fantastic cook, she was an energetic and effective cleaner, and the handy household tips that Aibileen gave Skeeter, out of her own experience, for her Miss Myrna column are really good.

Everyone agreed that the ending of the book was the worst part of it. Suddenly Minny’s, Aibileen’s and Skeeter’s problems are resolved in a “magic wand” effect, as though the author had got tired of writing and decided to finish it all off in a hurry. The book is overall a good read, but not great literature or world-changing. We talked about where racism “comes from”, whether it is taught or inherited or what. It seems to be ignorance that is inherited, and actual prejudice is taught.

We wound off the evening with a glorious Sri Lankan curry: Ranmali was the artist in charge. Grateful thanks from everyone!

P.S. Interesting footnote, thanks to the Daily Mail>: The real Abilene