New Release: The Help

In The Help, a first novel by Kathryn Stockett, it is the 1960s and Jackson, Mississippi is still in the grip of racial segregation. White women trust their black housemaids with the children but not with the family silver, and the black maids are more afraid of the wrath of the society matrons than of the KKK. The two main items on the Jackson Junior League’s agenda are sending food to the starving children of Africa and promoting the Home Help Sanitation Initiative to encourage homeowners to build a separate bathroom for the maid.

Skeeter Phelan sees the irony of the situation, though she doesn’t claim an interest in civil rights or political affairs. But when Skeeter returns from college and finds that her family’s maid and her longtime confidante, Constantine, has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, she starts asking questions that could permanently disrupt the social status quo. She’s just trying to find out what happened to Constantine, while dodging her mother’s criticism and working on her fledgling writing career. But the only writing job she can get is a domestic advice column in the local paper, so she turns to her friend’s maid, Aibileen, for advice about rust stains, silver polish, and laundry.

Aibileen has raised seventeen white children in her career as a maid, but since her own son died in an accident at the sawmill where he worked, she has begun to chafe under the pressure of racial inequality. She is willing to answer Miz Skeeter’s questions about household maintenance, but she refuses to talk about Constantine — and when Skeeter gets a daring idea for a book about the life of a Mississippi housemaid, Aibileen realizes that telling the truth could be a matter of life and death.

Aibileen’s best friend, Minny, doesn’t know how not to tell the truth, and her opinions are about to spell the death of her employment options. She has gotten on the bad side of Hilly Holbrook, queen bee of the Jackson social set, and if word gets out about the Terrible Awful she committed against the all-powerful Hilly, losing another job will be the least of Minny's troubles.

As the civil rights movement heats up, a New York editor agrees to read the book that Skeeter has written with Aibileen, Minny, and several other maids. The stories they tell are about a complex relationship of both love and hate, trust and fear, interdependence and inequality. If anyone figures out the anonymous work is really about Jackson — well, none of them wants to think about what might happen then. The women have a plan to keep their big secret, with the unwitting help of the fearsome Miss Hilly, but the book will change all their lives.

This book is excellent—complex, detailed, engaging, and well-written. The author captures the individual characters’ voices with amazing understanding. A topic like segregation is easily turned into a lecture or a horror story, but The Help shows the full range of emotion — love, friendship, humor, petty squabbles, worries about money or boyfriends or what Mama might say. It gives a rare and insightful view of segregation and racial conflict from the inside, from the personal perspective of seemingly minor players in the larger drama.

And if literary characters can be judged by God, I’m pretty sure Hilly Holbrook is going to hell.

--Tiffany H.