Aegis 2011
100
Book Review >>> Chelsea Ferrin
The Help Kathryn Sockett. New York: Penguin Group, 2009. 444 pp.
Kathryn Sockett’s The Help is set in the early 1960’s in the still very racially segregated city of Jackson, Mississippi where the words “negro” and “colored” are still used to describe people of African American decent, and the only place for a black woman in a white woman’s home is as “the help.” Three different women, two black maids and one young white woman, narrate this story. The three main characters, Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter, all take turns telling their stories in a journal-like fashion, their accounts paralleling and often times intersecting one another. Sockett attempts to mimic the dialect of both southern black and white women, which proves to be a challenge to read at first, but ultimately immerses the reader in the world of the story. Readers can imagine themselves standing in the kitchen with Aibileen, or listening to Minny complain about her employer. In this novel, Sockett attempts to show what life was like for black maids in the south, while interjecting what readers can assume is her own voice and perspective in the form of Skeeter (Eugenia Phelan). Skeeter, bothered by the way she sees her friends treating their maids, and moved by a love for her own maid growing up, decides she wants to write a book of interviews that shows what life is really like for black maids who work for white families. The other two narrators, Aibileen and Minny, are both maids who have spent most of their lives working for white women, whose beds they have made and whose children they have practically raised. In her novel, Sockett attempts to show the contradictions that existed in society for these maids who were treated as unequal, and yet are given the full responsibility of raising white children. One such contradiction is the “Hilly Holbrook’s Home Help Sanitation Initiative.” Hilly, a long time friend of Skeeter’s, takes it upon herself to create an initiative to help home owners install “maid toilets” in all the homes in Jackson that do not already have these “special” toilets installed because, as Hilly so eloquently states, “It’s just plain dangerous. Everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do.” (8) Hilly, of course, has a maid herself, and allows her maid to cook her food and care for her children, but the maid cannot use the same bathroom that Hilly and her family use because that would be unsanitary. Of course, not all of the white women Sockett’s story are as racist as Hilly Holbrook. Sockett has really tried to give a fair representation of the different attitudes expressed by both maids and employers (white women) alike. Some of the employers, like Cecilia Foote, Minny’s employer, are practically color blind and want nothing more than to be friends with their maids. Cecilia even goes so far as to sit at the same table and eat meals with Minny, which is considered improper by Hilly and many other women in Jackson. On the other hand, some maids are represented as being just as racist as Hilly. One maid, Gretchen,
