The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan lives a mundane life in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's playing bridge with the girls she grew up with and writing the newsletter for the Children's Benefit.  Skeeter dreams of a bigger and better life as an editor for a publishing company or for a magazine.  She writes to many places but the only job she can get is writing the domestic column for the local newspaper.  Skeeter doesn't know anything about domestic housekeeping as she has been raised in the south with a housekeeper who does all the house cleaning and all the cooking.

Since she doesn't know anything about housekeeping, Skeeter takes her column questions to her friend Elizabeth's housekeeper Aibileen.  Aibileen, reluctantly at first, answers all her questions and helps her with the column.  Soon they become friends and Aibileen tells her about her son who passed away and how he had dreams of writing a book about how blacks are treated by their white counterparts which gives Skeeter the idea for the book "The Help".  She hires Aibileen and twelve of her maid friends to tell stories for the book of working for whites in the South.  The stories tell of mistreatment, abuse and heartbreak but also of love and attachment for the children they help to raise.  And the telling of the stories itself is dangerous as it is set in the time of the civil rights movement and there are laws against whites and blacks conspiring together for any reason.   They have to very careful and meet in secrecy or someone could get hurt or worse.

I loved the dialogue of the book because you get the true nature and character of each of the maids through their voices.  Particularly Aibileen because she tries so hard to teach the white children she cares for to not be racist.

“Once upon a time they was two girls," I say. "one girl had black skin, one girl had white."
Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening.
"Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?'
"But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. You got hair, I got hair.'"I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head.
"Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.'"I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.
"Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on.
"'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."
Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn't even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.” 

I think this is an important book, even in modern times, because it shows not only how far we have come towards racial improvement but how far we still have to go.  I laughed and I cried and I gobbled the whole thing up in less than a week. 

Published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (February 10, 2009).