The Help

Last week I wrote about a team of people who are on the cusp of fulfilling of a dream, to drive a fire engine around the world and how it reminded me of things that I’m still to do. Namely a road-trip across America, to see the sights, enjoy the tastes and smells whilst embracing a diversity of culture that is barely rivalled in any other country on the globe. Someone else once had a dream. He spoke about it in-front of millions and was ultimately murdered in cold blood because of it. His name was Martin Luther King.

Imagine then if you can, an alternative road-trip, one that’s taken in a DeLorean like Marty McFly, which allows you to drive across America whilst zigzagging through the great space-time continuum. How different would your story be? What would you have made of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which you probably learnt about, like me - in school? Add to the learnt dates, names, facts and figures, an understanding of the depth of feeling and assess how large the stain on humanity it really was.

In the past few days I finished reading a book called “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett, which is set in the deep south just as the civil rights movement was starting to gain momentum. A story of three women from opposite sides of the ‘divide’ living in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s, each telling their individual stories whilst collectively providing the reader a glimpse into how people lived their lives back then.

This is as a whole, a work of fiction, cleverly written so that it sounds authentic without adding romance or dramatising what is a delicate subject to many. Without sensationalising the narrative the reader gets a genuine glimpse of how people were treated as second class citizens, such as being made to urinate in special built toilets at the end of the garden despite having a perfectly good bathroom in the house that was never in use, or having suspicious looks thrown your way if something went missing, despite trusting you enough to look after and nurse their children.

Aibileen and Minny are the two maids whose narrative is told alongside Miss Skeeter, a white women who grows up alongside a generation of ‘society girls’ but begs to be different, wants to do something with her life, wants to write and have a job and not just marry someone suited to her by her parents and have elevenses at the local tennis club.

Through Miss Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny form a secret friendship as they tell her their stories of working as maids for white families either as bringing up white children, 17 in all for Aibileen and Minny who is better known for her cooking, which is descriptive and appetising despite the chronically unhealthy sounding recipes, with ingredients such as; okra, grits, fried chicken, baked hams and black eyed peas used religiously.

Despite the richness of flavours and masterful way in which the author has written three distinct voices to create three characters you miss long after the book has finished, you can’t help but ask yourself, is this how people were actually treated? Is this really the way in which people were led to behave, treat as “normal” and have such genuine lack of respect for another human being purely on the basis of colour?

A measure of a great book - in my mind, is if your left asking yourself poignant questions, despite laughing wholeheartedly at several places throughout the story, or cheering like a banshee as the underdog strikes back. But more than that, a great book evokes a time and a place where you feel that you want to visit, even if it is to right a wrong or educate someone on what they wrongly know to be true.