Powerful novel highlights civil rights
By Sue Blechl, Special to The Gazette
Friday, June 12, 2009
“The Help” by Kathryn Stockett, Putnam, 2009.
By Sue Blechl
Special to The Gazette One of the best books I’ve read this year!
It’s 1962 in Jackson, Miss. White families often employ help, typically black women who raise the children and keep house. Aibileen and Minny are two African-American maids who work for well-off families. They are best friends.
Aibileen is raising her 17th white child; Minny has trouble keeping a job because of her sassiness. When Skeeter, who is white, moves home after getting her English degree at Ole Miss, she is determined to become a journalist and is hired to write a weekly cleaning column for the local paper. Having no experience in this venue, she consults Aibileen, who provides all the advice.
Skeeter splits the $10 a week she earns with Aibileen, and a successful but secret, collaboration begins.
Race relations in the South are tense. Miss Hilly, a local socialite, adds a toilet in the carport just for the black help, so that her white friends won’t be exposed to “Negro disease.” She begins a campaign encouraging all her friends to do the same, and a battle of sorts begins.
Skeeter and Aibileen undertake a writing project that turns this domestic situation on its head. Soon Minny gets involved and the stakes are raised. With suspense, pathos and hope, the story of unlikely friends unfolds. Told in alternating voices, the three women’s accounts share the common traits of courage, humor, trust and the pursuit of justice. Though fiction, the book presents us with a front seat to the civil rights movement and the culture of the ’60s.
It makes for powerful reading. This novel will make a wonderful book group choice.
The author’s Web site includes discussion questions and biographical information, which parallels the Skeeter character. Heartily recommended.
On the Net:
www.kathrynstockett.com/
• On the Shelf is written by staff and volunteers of the Emporia Public Library.