Tuesday 23 August 2011

"The Help," Kathryn Stockett

Here comes "The Help"! A coworker read it, and it was recommended on various Twitter feeds (more on that later), so I decided to pick it up. The plot--for those who haven't seen the commercials for the movie--a Southern white girl writes down the stories of black maids for a book back in the early 1960s, and all sorts of drama ensue.

Generally, the book and the film both got a good reception, although there has been some dissent over the historical inaccuracies (Black Panthers in the early 1960s?), the use of dialect, and the depiction of race relations during the civil rights era, which is definitely, er, whitewashed (hur hur).

That was my main problem with the book--I really don't know much about 1960s Mississippi, but I know enough to tell that the world of "The Help" is a much gentler world than the reality. People get away with shit (literally) that they wouldn't be able to do in Real Life without coming in for the risk of some severe physical harm.

But if the book was going to be unrealistic, couldn't it have been just totally unrealistic? Take the ending: Skeeter, the white girl who wrote the book, gets a dream job in New York far away from her straitlaced life with her family on a Mississippi cotton farm. She'll be financially independent, have a much wider range of romantic prospects, and be able to make friends who aren't completely disgusting puckered-up assholes. Meanwhile, Aibileen, the "main" black maid, who didn't have a family to begin with (I think her son was run over by a lumber truck, just like Meg Ryan in "City of Angels," but I might be making that up), is stuck wandering around the city, unemployed. Seeing as there isn't much for black women to do in the universe of "The Help" other than deal with white people--all the black men are dead or abusive, and apparently Medgar Evans did 99 percent of the civil rights work--presumably poor Aibileen just hangs out at church, growing poorer and poorer until she keels over one day and dies. Rotten!

Aibileen should have kidnapped the ugly white baby she was taking care of and run off to join the Black Panthers, who in this version are all rich and live in some sort of offshore enclave that looks like Martinique. I'm not sure where it goes from there, but it definitely seems more fair than leaving the woman to wander around without a job.

I think I'm just bitter that there are no magical Negroes left to help me achieve my dreams. If only black people still couldn't vote, then I could be slightly nicer to them than other, horribly nasty white people, and then they would get me, I don't know, a trip to Paris and just be happy that I remembered to send a postcard. Tragically black people are not the same as fairytale elves.

If you want to read a well-thought-out piece on all the many, many issues that "The Help" has, read this great essay by Roxane Gay Bio over at The Rumpus.

1 comment:

K. said...

I am glad that you have read this book so that now I do not have to. It has been on my To Read list for ages, after everyone was recommending it so much, but something was always holding me back... skepticism? doubt? a zillion other books to read? Dunno. But thank you, in any case, for these helpful (hur hur) words about The Help (and also for a City of Angels reference to brighten my lonely disscave day).