Help, The

The Help (2009), the first novel of white author Kathryn Stockett, tells the story of Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a white, upper-middle-class woman who returns to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962 after graduating from the University of Mississippi. Seeing her segregated town through new eyes, Skeeter, an aspiring writer, launches a plan to interview black female domestic workers for a book that will reveal life from their perspective.

Over the course of two years, Skeeter grapples with the growing division between herself and her white racist friends, her mother's progressing terminal illness, the mysterious disappearance of her childhood maid Constantine, and a turbulent relationship with a senator's son. These elements, however, primarily serve as a backdrop to the novel's exploration of the inequities of southern segregation during the civil rights movement.

After successfully pitching her idea to Elaine Stein, an editor at Harper & Row, Skeeter solicits the help of Aibileen Clark, a friend's maid. As Aibileen's faith in the project grows, she attempts to recruit other maids, the most notable being the outspoken Minny Jackson, who often finds herself unemployed because of her unwillingness to accept abuse from whites. After a maid is arrested for theft, 10 other women finally agree to participate. The relationships between Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny (the book's three narrators) unfold what, according to Stockett, is the novel's most salient point: we must recognize the fundamental similarities and humanity of all people.

Because of proscriptions against interracial socializing, or any form of civil rights agitation, the interviews are conducted in secret, a necessity that highlights the black women's desire to claim a voice, even at great risk to themselves and their families. Were they to be discovered, the white community would certainly respond with both physical and economic violence. Key events in the civil rights movement woven into Stockett's narrative set the larger context for the maids’ stories. These events include James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi (October 1962); the assassinations of Medgar Evers (in Jackson, June 1963) and John F. Kennedy (November 1963); Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington (August 1963); and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (September 1963).

Although the manuscript becomes an open secret in the black community, the whites only learn of the project after the book—titled Help: Colored Domestics and the Southern Families for Which They Work—is published and begins to receive media attention. Despite Skeeter's attempts to disguise real names and location, the white community in Jackson soon recognizes itself in the book's pages and attempts first to identify the maids and then to exact revenge. Their efforts are curtailed, ironically, by Hilly Holbrook, who is the most racist of Skeeter's friends, the president of the Jackson Junior [Page 1059]League and the force behind the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, which would require separate bathrooms for the “colored help” in all white homes. Hilly must vehemently deny the book is set in Jackson because it (strategically) reveals that she had eaten two slices of a chocolate pie into which Minny had mixed her own feces after being unjustly fired by Hilly.

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