Kathryn Stockett is an American novelist known for her debut novel, The Help. She is a graduate of the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing. The novel climbed the bestseller charts, eventually selling five million copies, winning BookBrowse’s Readers Award and spending more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list. It has since been published in 35 countries in three languages. The novel has now been adapted into a film by the same name and is playing successfully to packed cinema houses.
The novel is about three African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s — a troubled time in American history, full of racial insults. The novel is narrated by three narrators, Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has lost her son recently, Minny Jackson, an African-American maid whose backtalk towards her employers results in her having to frequently change jobs and Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan, a young white woman and the daughter of a prominent white family whose cotton farm employs many African-Americans in the fields. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan dreams of becoming a writer while her mother’s priority for her is to get her married.
On her return home after her graduation, Skeeter comes to know that Constantine, the maid who raised her and had been writing to her the whole time while she was away at college, has mysteriously disappeared and is nowhere to be found. Skeeter’s family, avoiding the topic, tells her that the maid abruptly quit her job and went on to live with her relatives in Chicago. During her weekly bridge club meetings, her friends come up with the idea of having separate bathroom facilities for the “coloured” help, not allowing them to use the toilets in their employers’ houses so that they do not pick up any “black diseases”.
The discussion awakens Skeeter to the realisation of how black maids are treated very differently from white people and the hierocracy shown by the white community while eating cakes, tab drinking, cigarette smoking and pretentiously planning fundraisers for the “poor starving children of Africa”. She decides to reveal the truth to the world from the black maids’ perspectives — voices never before heard in print — by writing a book, collecting the life stories of the black maids. “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life. Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling.” An insane idea, as perceived by her white community, is countered beautifully by the writer: “I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” The book sumptuously tells the story of the privileged families living in Jackson and the black women who work as maids and nannies for them but live in a separate part of town, segregated from the whites and treated like dogs.
Written from the perspective of three extraordinary women, the daily lives of Southern homemakers and their maids are explored. It speaks of their determination to start a movement that will forever change their town and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers and friends treat and view one another. These brave women come together for a clandestine project that will put their jobs and even their lives in jeopardy.
The book highlights the irony of black women trusted to raise white children but not allowed to polish the household silver. It talks about the outrageous insults dished out by racist employers, the enforced segregations and the blatant racism, society-wide and on individual levels: “Every morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, ‘Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?’”
Whether or not Skeeter eventually gets the book written and published must be left to the reader to explore. This is a deeply moving novel filled with human insensitivities, humorous moments, hope and at times funny insights into women and their behaviour: “Mrs Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.” Though the story is based in the 1960s, it is easy to feel how the issues raised still apply in the current times where lack of love towards humanity has become a norm: “All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.” More importantly, it gives us an opportunity to look inwards individually by examining the way we treat our fellow human beings, regardless of race or social class.
The reviewer is a social activist. He can be reached at [email protected]