Saturday, July 16, 2011
The Help..hmmm
I read this book when it first come out. I read it with mixed feelings. I finished it with mixed feelings and I will probably see the movie. All of my friends LOVED this book. I have to admit when I finished reading this book, I felt as if it wasn't the author's place to write the stories of 1960's maids in the South. Somehow, a white socialite should not be telling the story of racism and segregation from an African American woman's point of view. The author's father claims she is "stirring the pot and her brother's housekeeper is suing her see here. I had my own "maid" Annabelle growing up. She only came once a week to iron, but I would sit and watch her iron all day and sometimes she would let me sprinkle the clothes with the Coke bottle full of water and starch and help her roll the clothes. Annabelle's husband died when a log truck that he was driving unleashed the logs with him under them. My grandmother would put a twenty dollar bill under the ironing board when she got a new "maid" to see if she was trustworthy. And my mother would make Annabelle lunch using the same plate and glass every week. That plate and glass were put in the cupboards and were not to be used by anyone but Annabelle. I can tell you how how the injustice makes me feel, but there is no way I could know how it felt on the insides of these women to be "the help". The stories in the book I'm sure are all true. The injustices, the prejudices, the racism all true. It isn't the storytelling that bothers me. It is the storyteller. As the movie is coming out, I still have that same feeling that it is just not right for a Jackson, MS. junior leager to be telling this story from "The Help" point of view. Like me, she lived it on the other side.
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2 comments:
I was loaned that book and have yet to read it. I see I need too. We too growing up had our "Francis". She worked for my parents for years dealing with 7 children, and really putting up with some mess when the boys were growing up. We have many stories, and fond memories of our Francis. She was part of our family for so many years. She wasn't the brightest on the block, but she was there helping my mother and looking after us. I don't remember Mama keeping special plates and glasses for her though at our house. Enjoyed your blog about this author Dena.
I am going to speak to this from a slightly different perspective, in that how and where we make the friends of our lives we never know and how we listen to their stories and then in turn, share them, we never know. Three weeks before I was born, Margaret came to work with my family. I became her baby. She worked a as a maid not only for my parents but for an elderly town matriarch, bigoted and mean. When I was about 8, my parents asked Margaret to come and work with them in their store. She was the first black sales clerk in my hometown, a few years before the Civil Rights Movement actually took hold. She was the one that opened and locked the safe, she was the one who was elemental to my mother doing all the society houses for Christmas and the furniture showrooms in Lenoir and Germany and the society windows. She was my rock, and I always, her baby. We shared stories, and boy did I know that town matriarch inside out. She and my Mama could be heard giggling in the kitchen at their own storytime and Papa and she had theirs as well.In addition to Margaret, there was Nona and Ruby, the "help" for others in town, but dear friends to my Mother and Father. True friends in the sense of the word where each shares lives with the other, time and meaning with the other. My mother's car was as often seen in the "black" part of town as in the white. It was our life. These women instrumental to making us who we were and are and their stories and secrets adding a richness and depth we would have been lost without. I went off to college and later Seattle, and when I got home always the big pot of creamed corn would be waiting for me and the big grin and open arms, and shared stories. Sometimes when I was home I would spend the night with Margaret, after her first stroke I was glad I was home and could pick her up at the hospital, be the one to take her gently home. When her daughter decided she was moving her in with her, taking her from NC to Connecticut, it broke Margaret's heart and ours. It was Mama and me that went and stayed that last weekend with our friend and helped her pack up her life. When she died it was her granddaughters and me that gave the eulogy, we were all the keeper of her stories, the sad and sweet ones, the brave and true ones, the hilarious ones. Friendships and sharing stories evolve how they evolve in life and it is through them however they evolve that we learn about each other's journeys, trials and triumphs. It is through the sharing of stories that impact us that others do as well. Maybe that is the case with the woman who wrote this book. Maybe. I will take Mama to see The Help and I will sit there and I will think of Nona, Ruby and most of all, Margaret and the people who were instrumental in forming my life, my heart and my own stories.
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