I was 25 when I married and moved from the plains to Mississippi. It was like diving in the deep end of Southern Culture.  I traded wide, far, horizons for close, verdant landscapes; dry heat for humidity; corn for okra.  I also fell headlong, into beliefs and traditions that weren’t my own. For example, one of my first neighbors was a kind old lady, who continually delighted and frustrated me. She insisted on calling me Mrs. Golden but demanded I only use her first name. And, even though she knew more about the place where we lived, she deferred to me in every question. Now I had been raised to recognize the authority of older, more-experienced, ladies, especially when using their names, but my neighbor’s education was different.  She had been taught skin color establishes who is in charge I was fair while she was dark.  Because we’d been taught differently, my neighbor and I spent most of our afternoons trying to outdo each other in courtesy. It’s sad but our mutual efforts to show each other respect became one more wall that kept us apart.

My memories of those sweltering afternoons of frustration all came flooding back when I read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help.  Although this story takes place in the 60’s, it reminds me of the place I met 25 years later.

The Book

Stockett’s Jackson, Mississippi is like a never-ending high school in some ways. Just like high school, the popular ones measure power by who they exclude. They create rules to undermine and isolate anyone they view as competition. Blacks were cut off from whites; singles from marrieds; boys from girls, and “well-born” people from “trash.”  Meandering through this miasma is Skeeter, a girl whose height and ambition exclude her from the group. More than anything, Skeeter wants to be a published author and, since the Civil Rights unrest is in the news, she decides to write about the least powerful groups in Jackson; the black women who work in white households.  That decision and the resulting book overturns Jackson, Mississippi and the lives of each soul in The Help.

The Help has received a lot of well-deserved praise for capturing the tenor of that tumultuous period, but it is the humanity of the characters that I like. All of the central characters of The Help are female and ensnared by the rules and expectations of their society. This trap infuriates some and enrages many, but they all suffer pressure. Because of these strictures, the women all become creatures of want, some chasing the love, and power they think will make them happy or fighting to survive. Still, The Help isn’t just about what happens to people in an awful situation.  It’s about how they survive even in the worst of times.