Image via Wikipedia
I thought this blog would turn out like my “real” mean girls burn book kinda blog. Where you use pseudonyms and basically rant about the moments and the people that annoy you, a cathartic and bitchy rant. This has not been the case. Instead, I feel this blog is moving into something much more healthy and definitely more kind, a book blog. Not just any book blog. I am realizing as I write about books that 1) I miss this. I miss school and holding educated discussions about books and trying to influence my peers why I’m right and why my conclusion of the book is correct (for the record, I LOVE LOVE LOVE when someone can change my opinion but no one ever comments or read this blog so that’s rather hard). 2) There is something wonderful about writing about books, I find myself thinking and relating it to my own life. Bibliotherapy at its finest. Maybe it is because I’m unemployed and spend hours a day applying for jobs and this is my only human contact throughout the day, but I genuinely hope this project sticks.
Yesterday, in one single sitting, I finished The Help. I did not just join the bandwagon, I had actually purchased it over a year ago on sale. I knew it was a “big read” due its placement on the B&N shelf of honor, you know what I’m talking about. After letting a friend borrow and read it a few weeks she said good things about it. Then came the beautiful, wonderful, talented, redheaded Emma Stone and she was in a movie about this book. My love for her and respect for Viola Davis cinched it, I was going to read The Help.
With so much free time, this of course was an easy choice. After 4 hours of applying for jobs everyday, I needed something interesting and entertaining to stop me from shooting myself. Instead, I took up Kathryn (I love that spelling) Stockett’s novel and proceeded to read it one afternoon/evening. This has not happened in some time, not since Jodi Picoult My Sister’s Keeper has a book made me sit. Hell, I even passed on my daily Angry Birds play and the wonderful Super Paper Mario for Wii to readthis book. That ain’t no joke.
I’ll admit, before reading the book, I had read an Entertainment article about the book and its backlash and Viola Davis’ eloquent defense of the book and the movie. All this in mind, I read the book and here is what I have to say. Her book is lovely and the prose while not the best does seem to read like a yummy hot summer day. It does get me thinking. Do White authors have the authority to write a Black experience? Especially one from the racially charged 1960’s? This is something I have personally struggled with. So much so that a wonderful professor, Dr. Piper Kendrix-William’s, let me take an independent study to focus on the implications of White writers writing a Black experience. I wish The Help had been out then because it would have helped immensely.
My answer is one of White guilt. I don’t know if it is right but I like the idea of trying. I think that by trying you are trying to understand the experience and only by attempting to understand the experience (because none of us White people will ever KNOW what it means to be forced to use a different drinking fountain or have your intelligence or morality question because our skin pigment happens to be different) can you truly begin to make amends and heal. So does Stockett have the right, probably not, but this novel seems to be an apology and a thank you and a more loaded tribute to her own childhood maid, Demetrie.
I’ll start with Skeeter because as a White girl myself, I can understand her and she’s safe territory. Not the girl from money but the girl wanting to help. I always wondered if I had lived during those times would I have the courage of conviction to do something. What this novel does well is it does not make Skeeter an easy hero who comes and saves the day. Her position is complicated and my favorite scene was one that made me incredibly uncomfortable with its honesty. True art makes you uncomfortable and question your reality and the scene where the maid Gretchen during an interview tells Skeeter that she is just another White woman trying to make money off of Black people and that no one likes her let alone trusts her is a real moment. It shakes the young girl and the reader. You question if the help she can bring to the Black cause is worth the harm she is potentially doing. Then too is the fact that she is woefully uneducated on the Civil Rights movement. There are a few scenes when someone asks her something whether it be about the March or Medgar Evans who lived in her own town and she seems rather clueless. She’s so absorbed in becoming a writer that she has forgotten the movement that directly impacts her book. There is more I could say about Skeeter but when coming to say goodbye to Aibileen Clark she cries and needs permission to be released from her guilt. Because at the end of the day, Skeeter suffers from what I too suffer and I think many White people do, White guilt that comes from the privilege and injustice of never being watched to carefully in a store because I was an assumed shoplifter. When she found out the vile things her mother did to Constantine, well she chose to continue loving her mother despite the hate in that woman’s heart.
Minny was my favorite. She was angry and soft and sweet and sour to the whole world. I think I know many women like Minny. She seems real. She’s nervous and she doesn’t trust easily and you have to earn that woman’s respect. She’s revengeful, a quality I always admire in women, always. She stands up to her White employers and let them know what’s what but she’s scared against her husband. By standing up to Hilly she is embodying the Civil Rights movement but then she seems cautious to openly join it. Her complex and contradictory nature is raw and human. To be blunt and ineloquent, it sucks that Stockett obviously has a problem writing Minny. She is angry and rightfully so yet she sacrifices more than most. Her chapters seem to be fewer and shorter and not as hardy as the other characters and yet, she shines through as the most realistic character in the entire novel and I love that.
Aibileen is a more a predictable character. I read some reviews to call her the female Uncle Tom but I take issue with that. Some Blacks did have affectionate and emotional bonds with their employers, it’s called being human. That doesn’t mean you are a slave to White society and can’t fight oppression and I think Aibileen proves that. Yes, she had incredible attachments to the children she raised but the fact she wanted to mold these children to love themselves and not be hateful vile creatures like their parents is pretty damn admirable. She worked the system from the inside. She had her bitterness too but she worked to achieve something. To call her an Uncle Tom is unfair. Do I think she was realistic, probably not. There is something about Aibileen that does trouble me only I haven’t been able to put a finger on it. Instead, I’ll reserve the right to comment at a later date and update this blog when I figure it out.
With that I’ll wrap this up as unfinished as the novel. Unfortunately very very few novels, movies, relationships, etc. end well. The Help was no exception. It felt contrived and rushed and sloppy. So, I will end this blog in that same way.
lipstickmoonlight 