The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Skeeter is twenty-one and has just graduated from Ole Miss. She’s returned home to Jackson in 1962 ready to fulfill the expectations of her life by marrying well and having a family. But things don’t go as planned.

The Help is told in three voices: Skeeter; Aibileen, an older black woman who has been taking care of white families since she was 13; and Minny, a younger black woman who finds it difficult not to speak her mind.

The novel opens with the event that opens Skeeter’s eyes to the injustice of a skewed system when a friend presents to their bridge group her plans for a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative”—building separate bathrooms for the black domestic workers in their homes. Skeeter may have had her consciousness raised, but it takes along while before she can treat Aibileen as a person, rather than a colored person. It also takes a long while for Aibileen to trust Skeeter.

In an afterword in the book Stockett quotes Pulitzer Prize winner Howell Raines, “There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of the affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.”

Stockett continues, “I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960’s. I don’t think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity. In The Help there is
one line that I truly prize:

Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people.
Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought. ”