Date: November 16, 2024
Author: Kathryn Stockett
Title: The Help
I put in a good 300 page effort into this one. I watched and appreciated the movie and I know how this story is portrayed to be a must read by everyone.
My biggest problem with this story is that it was written by a white woman. I understand that she has expressed apologies for any incorrect account of how things really were for a colored person in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. It was not a nice place for the colored community. And I understand had this story not been told by a white lady it may have never had the platform it would require to be picked up by the masses. In the end Mz. Stockett did say that she grew up in Jackson and had her own maid. That makes me feel like she is just like her character Skeeter using Aibileen’s tips on cleaning for her Miss Myrna column. Ironically Mz. Stockett writes this paragraph on page 128, ‘“I told her, let the regular old history books tell it. White people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time.”’
One other incident I couldn’t get past was the scene were Skeeter accidentally forgot her satchel with all the maid’s accounts of stories about life as a colored maid, and a pamphlet of Jim Crow laws. Now, Skeeter knows how incredibly sensitive this material is and the brutality these maids would suffer if it got out they were telling stories about their white employers. They could be killed. Have their tongues cut out. Beaten. Any number of horrors. Sounds like a pretty important satchel. I know if I was in charge of it no matter how distracted or in a hurry I was I’d never let it out of my sight. It started feeling like the story was going to hinge heavily on this fact and I couldn’t get past it to enjoy the ending.
If you do not agree I invite you to leave your comments….
Addendum: I felt guilty for not finishing the story. It’s so widely known and I get the importance of the subject matter.
I got sucked in.
*spoiler alert* I got to twenty pages left to go and Hilly figured out who one of the maids was, all because one of the accounts from one of the interviews, Skeeter wrote a story that identified a specific scratch in a specific table. If they were being so careful not to make any connections identifiable between the story and Jackson Mississippi. If all that was so, then why did they include that in the book? Why not just install a big neon sign over the offending maid’s head. That is where there was no turning back. I gave this one better than my best college try.