Remarkable Women
The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Penguin, 2009
Reviewed by Kathy Lowe
From the cover it could be another pot boiler about the American South. But Kathryn Stockett's The Help is anything but. It offers a biting expose of racism as lived by black maids raising white children in Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s.
The novel is set against the background of the US civil rights movement. The maids are but dimly aware of the momentous events going on around them until one catches sight of Martin Luther King on her boss's TV.
Daughters and grand-daughters of slaves, the maids face daily humiliation and cruelty at the hands of feather brained well heeled women ready to sack them on a whim. But the tables are turned when a young white woman, an aspiring journalist from Jackson, persuades two of the maids to tell their stories for a book she is putting together. At great risk to their livelihoods, not to mention their personal safety, Aibileen and Minny finally agree to cooperate and get others involved.
For the naive journalist Skeeter, a character almost certainly based on Stockett herself, this experience is a revelation. The more she sees society through the eyes of the maids the more she begins to question the values of the community she grew up in and the women she once called her friends.
The novel gives a really authentic feel for the early 60s when frilly-frocked white women were expected to keep house and keep quiet while their black maids were exploited at work and knocked around at home.
What comes through in the book, without sentimentality, is the black women's courage and humanity. Especially moving - even surprising - is their devotion to the white children in their care whose racist indoctrination by parents and teachers they quietly try to counteract.
The Help is as accessible as it is thought-provoking. It says a lot about racism but also about the oppression of women - black and white.