The book has been pretty widely reviewed, but in case you aren’t familiar with it: The Help tells the story of Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s through the eyes of a young white woman and several black women who work as maids. Skeeter Phelan is just out of Ole Miss without a husband or serious prospects, much to her mother’s dismay. She wants to be a writer, and she decides to interview local black women working as maids for her friends.
Reviews of this book tend to focus on whether or not the experience of the maids, and their vernacular, is believable and authentic. Let me first tell you that I don’t have a lot of way to know. I was born in 1971 and grew up in rural West Tennessee…which just isn’t the same thing at all as Jackson in the early 1960s. At the same time, I lived my childhood in the South just a few years removed from the height of the Civil Rights movement. I still don’t think I fully understand what I’ve seen and experienced in my lifetime. My views on race and the implications of race in politics and economics continue to evolve. I see my childhood and young adulthood through a different lens today than I did even 5 years ago, and a completely different way than I did at the time.
My family had a maid when I was growing up. Henrietta came to our house at least a couple of times a week throughout my childhood. She was our babysitter when my parents went out. She was a confidante to my sisters and me. And she loved us dearly, and we her.
I really can’t say our experience [either ours or Henrietta's] was like those described in The Help, despite the obvious similarities that we lived in the South, and that she was our black maid. The 10 years made a lot of difference, as did the distance between Jackson, MS, and my hometown. Henrietta worked in the produce department at my dad’s grocery store the other days of the week. I’ve never heard my parents use the n-word, and they were saddened by racist attitudes that were common in our hometown. I know their attitudes — probably not the majority views of white people in my hometown at the time, to be honest — were critical in shaping the way I viewed race.
And yet.
I find the book incredibly believable. Every bit of it. Stockett didn’t set out to write a social history, but a novel. And I find her novel to be one that speaks to an ugly but awakening time in our history with an authentic voice.