The Help is a well-written storey with genuine characters that will break your heart and make you laugh at the same time. The hardcover edition of the book was released in February 2009, and the paperback edition was released this spring.
‘The Help,’ by Kathryn Stockett, is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s and depicts the height of racial segregation. The story is told by three separate women: Minny, a black maid who can’t keep a job because of her fiery head, Aibileen, another black maid who is parenting her’seventeenth white child,’ and Miss Skeeter, a white woman who wants to be a writer. She’s been raised by black servants since she was a child, and she’s desperate to learn why her beloved maid, Constantine, has vanished.
In this book, The helpers are members of the black community who devote their lives to raising children from upper-class white households. The help spends their days feeding, clothing, and playing with the children they are engaged to look after, only to see them grow up and turn out like the rest of the white population, discriminating against the people who have reared them.
Skeeter devises a plan to interview “the help” and publish a book about their experiences working for white households while visiting her friends and their black maids (“the help”). She urges Aibileen to assist her by telling her storey and locating other black maids who will assist her in the same way. The plan is to write the book without using real names because real names would put people’s careers, and even their lives, in jeopardy. Aibileen initially dismisses Skeeter’s suggestion, but after further consideration, she realizes that she is tired of a world in which black women are trusted to raise white children but are forced to use different restrooms, are underpaid, and are not trusted to polish the family silver. She’s a wonderful person. She is open to change and recognizes that what she is doing is both liberating and dangerous.
Aibileen persuades her friend Minny to join the initiative and narrates her experience as well. They gain steam and collect accounts from a number of other black maids as they realize how liberating it feels to tell their stories. The stories they hear have a profound impact on the three women. The women discover that by sharing their stories, they have become closer to one another. Stockett’s writing is full of emotion and compassion.
I love this book because it shows how differences can bring people together. And racial issues have been a thing for a very long time. Often some books and movies portray black people differently.
The truth behind this novel is what makes it so passionate and effective. Stockett does not write with the primary intention of capturing the bleak days for black housemaids working in America during the era of racial inequity; rather, she portrays the truth of life. There are wars between the two communities, which are separated by skin color, but there are also tensions within both of their civilizations, and, most crucially, Stockett writes about friendships between the employer and the employee.
Stockett shows that not all black housemaids were mistreated by those who hired them, especially in the case of Minny, who helps the woman she works for, Celia, get through the pain of having her third miscarriage by teaching her how to cook better and improving her health and lifestyle. It is no secret that life was difficult for these women, but in the midst of their battle to survive and make ends meet while being paid the bare minimum, there was a helping hand from the African-American community, and acts of charity would shine through and offer them hope; Stockett depicts this in part through the generosity of the church and the sense of community that religion provides as a safe haven for everyone.
This book is definitely worth reading!
Sources: CSBSJU.EDU, The Guardian