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2 C Zbt Saptoton fiwnWeekend, February 20-21, 2010Book reviewsThe HelpStockett, Kathryn. TfomrHelp. New York. Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam,Penguin. 2009. Hardback. 451 pages. $24.95.ISBN978-0-399-15534-5 The Brown decision in 1954 bv the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation. Schools were mandated to integrate. Eight years later (1962) society in Jackson, Miss., remained the same.Kathryn Stockett tells0the story from three points of view, three voices, so well written the reader can see the characters. At the young age of 13, Aibileen began working in the homes of white ladies. Minny, younger thanAibileen, has difficulty con-0trolling her tongue and invites trouble by sayingexactly what she thinks.Skeeter, a white girl, newly graduated from college, is ambition to become a writer. She insists on more from life than finding a husband her mother will approve of.Skeeter and Hilly have0been friends since childhood, but when Skeeterindicates change needs to occur in relationships, Hilly is willing to sacrifice anyone to«rmaintain the statue quo. The maids ali feel that Hilly is out to get them.Living with asuper critical mother, Skeeter grew up in the kitchen with “the help.”Constantine loved unattractive Skeeter, even though she was painfully tall and situated in the back with the boys during class pictures. Her mother continued to give her advice on ways to appear shorter: wear flat-heeled shoes, stoop over a little, flattenyour hair.0When she was in college it was Constantine who answered her letters with information about all the mundane details of home. Skeeter saw their correspondence as a yearlong conversation with a dear friend.After graduation she returned home eager to visit with her nurse who had become her friend. Skeeter continues to search, asking why Constantine left sosuddenly just before Skeeter arrived home. No one offered any explanation. Shefaced a wall of silence.Skeeter is stunned that her mother could fire Constantine, whohad done for her the biggest favor of her life: raised her children; taught them manners and given them kindness for 29 vears.Skeeter applied to become an editor for one of the prestigious publishinghouses in New York- Theresponse from the senior editor suggested she get some writing experience first. She landed a job on the hometown newspaper writing a weekly cleaning advice column. She goes to Aibileen to get cleaning tips since Skeeter had never turned her hand at house-cleaning.Skeeters best friend, Hilly, mounted a campaign, “Home Help Sanitation 1 n i ti ative, claiming “the help brought diseases into the white homes. She insisted that all of the white families build separatebathrooms for the help.This is the event that opens the novel and opens Skeeters eyes to the skewed0injustice that she feels compelled to change. It seems that the blacks could cook for the white folks, but couldn’t sit down to dinner and eat with them. The maid washed the family’s dishes, but must eat from separate dishes, which thefamily never used. For the0 .first time, Skeeter consciousness is raised and she determines to do something about seldom-questioned rules for blacks and whites. She decided towrite anonymously about0 0the abuses the nannies endured. Complex and dangerous as she knows it will be for the women, she begins to interview reluctant “domestic housekeep-yyers.Kathryn Stockett writes0from personal experience. Demetrie, a black woman,cared for her when she was growing up. Although this story is set in 1962, sevenyears before Kathryn was• Jborn, she had another research tool in her grandfather who had a perfect memory of the times.Stockett says she could hear0the voice of Demetrie in herhead while writing, even though she had been dead15 vears.0Stockett’s use of dialect is perfect. She refused to use gonna, cain’t, shonuff, (except once), to mirror the language of theSouth.A quote: “1 reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you1 rf. ■ ' 0chilluns.” She drops a for of into a sentence, you get out a my house. Leaves out was, were, do, does. But Southern-born readers will recognize the speech patterns: She spec, Minny near bout the best cook ... mavbewin all Mississippi. My twofavorites: What vou call you0 0self doing? I’m fixing to ...Somehow the author makes her characters human, not stereotypes. Ittakes courage for a white woman to write about these times and abuses. Breaking rules, like the Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill A Mockingbird, is the heart of the novel.This quote from Kathryn Stockett (in her own words) gives the reader insight into why she wrote The Help:“I was raised by a colored woman ... the colored women down here raise a white child, then 20 years later the child becomes the employer. It’s irony that we love them and they love us,J 1yet we don’t even allow0them to use the toilet in ourhouse. Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure that dedicated her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt.’’The Help is the kind ofbook impossible to stop reading. The tension mounts as the maids who participated in the interviews with Skeeter watch and wait for the white ladies to identify the ficti-0tious names and fire the maids. Recalling the times in the South of the ‘60s and how much violence occurred, their fears ring true.Kathryn says her favorite sentence is, “... wasn’t that the point of the book? For more women to realize we are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’dJoAnMARTIN
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Baytown Sun
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Sat, Feb 20, 2010
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