Before discussing this book by Kathryn Stockett, I must confess that I’ve read only a handful of books (To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, Sycamore Row, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) in this genre (African-American history). Though this is a work of fiction, with everything that is happening in the world, I have to say it seemed very close to the truth than I’d have liked it to be. And what is even more disturbing is that I could find many parallels to things closer to home, in my very backyard.
The Help is a novel set in the 1960s in Jackson, in the southern state of Mississippi in the United States. The lines between the Whites and the Blacks have never been more prominent (or maybe it never changed). White women are expected to dress well, “catch” a nice White guy, marry him, have kids, host fundraisers, have bridge games, go out on dinners, and never have a single strand of hair out of place. And all this is made possible because of their Black Helps. Women who spend their entire day at the beck-and-call of the White family they serve (particularly the White women), leaving their own kids to grow up by themselves. But what do these Helps get in return? Nothing but contempt.
These are times when a Black Help cannot even use the toilet in the houses they serve and have special colored toilets outside the house. They have to eat their food outside the house, not sit at the same table as their bosses, have separate utensils allotted to them, and come dressed in Whites. And all this not even for minimum acceptable wages (This is just the plight of the Helps. If I were to talk about the situation of the other Black people in Jackson, I would never get to talking about the story of this book)!
Aibileen Clark has been a Help from a very young age. She’s raised seventeen White kids so far and is very good at her job. Her best friend, Minny Jackson (also a Help), is one of the best cooks in Jackson but gets into trouble only too often because she can’t handle being illtreated. She loses more jobs than she can count, but that is just the way she is.
Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan comes home after finishing college to find that her family’s Help, Constantine, the person who raised her, has quit. No amount of questioning yields her the answers to what happened to Constantine. Everyone seems to know what happened, but no one is willing to talk about it. And Skeeter just about gives up. Now ever since Skeeter came home, she seems to have “evolved” (or should we say she is now more woke). She is no longer able to bear the treatment bestowed upon the Black Helps by her childhood friends. But neither is she able to completely denounce their attitude because then she will have no friend left in her life. Driven by the need to do something meaningful with her life (she is also the only one in her group of friends to have a job!), she decides to write a book about the experiences of the Black Helps in Jackson, their relationship with their bosses, and the warm love they share with the White children they help raise. And that forms the crux of this story.
But Skeeter knows that she cannot write this book by herself. She wants this to be as close to the lives of the Helps as possible, not some third-person narration of their experiences and feelings. And she decides to ask for help from the Helps themselves. But they refuse to talk because doing so will endanger not just their jobs, but also their lives. These are perilous times to be Black and to have a voice for yourself. Blacks get thrashed for using the White toilets, so one can only imagine what would happen if they talk about their lives under the White women.
But when one of their friends is wrongly accused of something, it acts as just the fuel they needed to band themselves together and help Skeeter tell their stories, albeit anonymously.
When I picked up this book, I never thought I would finish reading it under three days. But that is how engrossed it kept me. For those of you who are hard-pressed for time, you can check out the movie version of the same instead. It stars the fantastic Viola Davis!
The Help may be fiction, but it is gut-wrenchingly close to reality. We are in 2020, and Black lives still don’t seem to matter. And when I said at the start that I found many parallels with things in my own backyard, I do not take it back.
There they call it Race, here we call it Caste.
The Invisibility Cloak 