Debut novelist takes on the South's troubled past

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it's a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn Stockett, who wasn't born until years after that time, manages to capture something close to reality while avoiding most of the pitfalls in her first novel, The Help.

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, The Help is told through three voices: Aibileen, an older black woman who has been taking care of white families since she was 13; Minny, a younger black woman who finds it difficult to curb her sharp tongue around her white employers; and Skeeter, a privileged white girl fresh out of college, who wants more from life than marriage to the first presentable young man her mother can produce.

Stockett, a Mississippi native who now lives in Atlanta with her husband and five-year-old daughter, says the idea of writing the book first came to her as an antidote to homesickness. She was working for a magazine consulting firm in New York City, but frequently found her thoughts turning to the South and to Demetrie, the black woman who cared for Stockett when she was growing up. Finally she asked her bosses if she could take a month off to write about these memories. She laughs when she remembers the response.

"They said, 'You're not in Mississippi anymore, Kitty.' They thought that people in Mississippi were a little more leisurely about jobs. I said, no, really, I don't want to be paid. I just want to take a month off because I want to hunker down and write this story. And something happened—it was so nurturing and wonderful to hear Demetrie's voice again. I think that's really what drew me to the story, to hear her talking in my head 15 years after she had died."

Although Stockett wasn't born until 1969, seven years after the events depicted in her book, she said she not only had a wealth of information provided by the stories Demetrie had told her, but also from her parents and her 98-year-old grandfather.

"Demetrie worked for my grandmother and my grandfather, starting in the mid-50s, and my grandfather has the most remarkable memory. He doesn't just remember details, he remembers dates. He remembers the temperature on that day; he's kind of a savant that way. So I had a pretty good research tool right there in the living room with me."

Stockett re-creates an environment that will be all too familiar to the people who lived through it: a time when "colored" people could cook food for white folks, but couldn't sit down and eat with them. When a colored maid could wash the family's dishes, but had to eat from her own plate because of the "germs" she might pass to her employers.

And heaven forbid that the black maid use the same bathroom as her white "family"! This is the event that opens the novel and that first opens Skeeter's eyes to the injustice of this terribly skewed system. After listening to her friend, Hilly, present her plans for a "Home Help Sanitation Initiative" to their bridge group, Skeeter follows Aibileen, the maid, into the kitchen.

"Do you ever wish you could . . . change things?" [Skeeter] asks.

And I can't help myself. I look at her head on. Cause that's one a the stupidest questions I ever heard. She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it.

I turn back to my washing, so she don't see me rolling my eyes. "Oh no, ma'am, everthing's fine."

Skeeter may have had her consciousness raised a tiny bit, but it takes a long while before she can treat Aibileen as a person, rather than a colored person. Likewise, it takes a lot for Aibileen to learn to trust Skeeter.

A key element of the book is Stockett's use of language. The rhythms of the dialect are nearly flawless, due in no small part to the author's refusal to use the "gonna," "cain't," "sho-nuff," spellings too many writers fall back on when trying to establish a sense of regionalism. Stockett credits this to her creative writing teacher at the University of Alabama.

"She taught me a lot of things, but she taught me one rule and that was, as long as it's a word in the dictionary, you can use it. So I had to be really creative in figuring out how to write idiom. As long as it didn't set off the Spell-Checker, that was the rule—I could use it."

Not all of the characters discriminated against in Stockett's novel are black. Celia Foote is a white girl from the wrong side of the tracks who married well, but can't break the barrier her background presents. Stockett felt she was important to the story, too.

"Just because you're white and good looking and rich doesn't mean you're going to walk in the door of the Junior League," she says. "I felt like if I was going to be talking about Southern women, I couldn't leave out the fact that sometimes, they love to snub their own kind."

While it was a daunting task to tackle stereotypes and successfully make her characters human, it took even more courage to write about this time and these issues as a white woman—something Stockett said she never forgot.

"You have to be careful what you say and how you say it, because people are really sensitive about this. We loved them [the black household workers] and they were part of our family but we didn't ask them to sit down at the table with us. That just wasn't done. Not that they were dying to sit down with us anyway, but there was a pretty well defined set of rules. And you knew what the rules were and you knew if you were breaking them."

Breaking rules forms the core of The Help, an idea summarized in what Stockett says is her favorite sentence of her first novel: "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.' "

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Copyright 2009 BookPage Reviews.

Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, when the civil rights movement was gathering momentum and the backlash was bloody, seems an odd place for a privileged white girl—a recent Ole Miss grad and editor of the Junior League newsletter—to start a secret book project collecting the stories, good and bad, of what it's really like for the black women who work for white families, intimates but always inferiors. "Skeeter" Pheelan does just that with the determined help of the help, Aibileen and Minny, two very different African American women who have spent their lives caring for their employers and raising their children. The Help, Kathryn Stockett's poignant, powerful debut novel, follows their intertwined efforts. Though it deals with very serious problems—segregation, intolerance, inhumanity—it's above all a wonderful story, hopeful and humorous, wonderfully told, with characters you won't want to leave. And, it's a fabulous example of how a brilliant ensemble audio performance can make "wonderful" even better. Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer and Cassandra Campbell's pitch-perfect narration captures the time and place, the accents of each character, as well as their sorrow, anger, frustration, hate, humiliation and genuine love with an authenticity that's hard to match. You'll laugh and cry as these three women work together, learn to go beyond their own preconceptions, learn to trust and truly overcome.

Copyright 2009 BookPage Reviews.

This month’s best paperback releases for reading groups include this year's National Book Award winner and two much-touted novels. 

Jennifer Egan’s raucous new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, offers a perceptive look at today’s music industry by focusing on the career of a man who’s seen it all. Bennie Salazar was in a punk band years ago in San Francisco. Now a record producer in New York, he serves as the center of Egan’s narrative, which is structured as a group of loosely connected vignettes about Bennie’s career and the California music scene that nurtured him. The book flashes back to Bennie’s wild past, conjuring a range of voices and characters from that era—groupies, street kids, would-be musicians—then returns to the present, highlighting the changes that have taken place (for the worst, mostly) in the music business. Egan develops a wonderful cast of characters along the way. There’s Sasha, a kleptomaniac who works for Bennie, and Scotty, a fellow musician who’s now a recluse. At once humorous and earnest, antic and tender, this is an inventive look at an aging artist and the passions that fueled his career. 

AT THE RACES
Winner of the National Book Award, Jaimy Gordon’s latest novel, Lord of Misrule, is a rich depiction of horse-racing culture set in West Virginia in the 1970s. Tommy Hansel, a trainer at Indian Mound Downs, hopes to swindle the competition through a con involving four different horses. When Tommy is joined at the track by Maggie, his attention-grabbing girlfriend, she’s quickly noticed by everyone, including gangster Joe Dale Bigg. Drawn to the dark side of racing, Maggie soon finds herself in need of protection, which arrives in the form of a tough guy named Two-Tie. At Indian Mound, a place where loyalty and honesty are in short supply, fortunes can change overnight, and Tommy’s luck doesn’t last long. In Gordon’s hands, the track is brought to vibrant life, populated with groomers and gamblers, coaches and owners. Her many narrative gifts include an ear for jargon, an instinct for pacing and a style that’s lyrical without being heavy-handed. This is a masterfully crafted novel that’s satisfying on every level. 

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
The top choice, hands down, of BookPage readers for best new title of 2009 will finally be available in paperback on April 5. With more than two million copies sold, The Help has been so successful in hardcover that publication of a paperback edition was delayed several times. Adding to the excitement surrounding this insightful Southern novel is a much-anticipated movie based on the book, scheduled for August release and starring up-and-comer Emma Stone. Set in Mississippi in the 1960s, the story of how smart, resourceful socialite Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan joins forces with two black maids, Minny and Aibileen, to write a book about the lives of Southern servants is a poignant and ambitious work of fiction. Through the alliance of this unlikely trio, Stockett examines the big shifts taking place in 1960s society. The novel’s crisp prose, fresh characterizations and inventive storyline all seem the work of an old hand, but this unforgettable novel is Stockett’s debut. 

Set in Stockett's native Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s, this first novel adopts the complicated theme of blacks and whites living in a segregated South. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, black maids raised white children and ran households but were paid poorly, often had to use separate toilets from the family, and watched the children they cared for commit bigotry. In Stockett's narrative, Miss Skeeter, a young white woman, is a naive, aspiring writer who wants to create a series of interviews with local black maids. Even if they're published anonymously, the risk is great; still, Aibileen and Minny agree to participate. Tension pervades the novel as its events are told by these three memorable women. Is this an easy book to read? No, but it is surely worth reading. It may even stir things up as readers in Jackson and beyond question their own discrimination and intolerance in the past and present. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/08.]—Rebecca Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights

In 1960s Jackson, MS, three very different women are brought together by a project that attempts to tell the stories of black women in service. Brilliantly narrated by Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell.

Four peerless actors render an array of sharply defined black and white characters in the nascent years of the civil rights movement. They each handle a variety of Southern accents with aplomb and draw out the daily humiliation and pain the maids are subject to, as well as their abiding affection for their white charges. The actors handle the narration and dialogue so well that no character is ever stereotyped, the humor is always delightful, and the listener is led through the multilayered stories of maids and mistresses. The novel is a superb intertwining of personal and political history in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, but this reading gives it a deeper and fuller power. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 1). (Feb.)