title: The Help by: Stockett, Kathryn published: 2011-09-29 read: 2024-07-25 preview

Walking through the city, I passed on of those public book shelves, I had time to spare, and decided to take a look. Not counting a Sendmail for Dummies, well that’s really a bit ancient?, I found only two English books: Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet – which I already read, years back, even when I forgot its contents – and The Help. New to me, or rather, unknown to me.

500 pages and 6 days later I felt enriched by this beautiful book. Someone mentioned in passing, oh yes, isn’t that that movie? and indeed it is. But unwavering I trotted through, after all,

In the kitchen, I fix some grits without no seasoning, and put them baby marshmallows on top. I toast the whole thing to make it a little crunchy. Then I garnish it with a cut-up strawberry. That’s all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.

I find that unfair; I like grits, just with some butter, pepper, salt. But I get it.

The above is a remark by Aibileen, a main character in the book, and one of the black household helps in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. Slavery is long over, officially, but segregation and lynching aren’t. Certainly not in Mississippi. The book is told, in turns, by Aibileen, by Minny – another maid – and ms. Skeeler:

MY EYES POP OPEN. My chest is pumping. I’m sweating. The greenvined wallpaper is snaking up the walls. What woke me? What was that? I get out of bed and listen. It didn’t sound like Mother. It was too high-pitched. It was a scream, like material ripping into two shredded pieces.

Skeeler, in her early 20s, was raised by her strict and multifaceted mother, but, in reality, by Constantine, the maid who was let go by her mother for reasons she only gets to hear in the final chapters of the book; that, while Skeeler is in college.

And perhaps that, her strict but understanding mother; the loss of her beloved nannie; and her increasing dissent with other young, white women in the town, make the beginning-journalist start on something that no one dared before: tell the stories of the maids in a deep-south, deeply troubled town.

And so the story plods on. A high level of suspense, while time and again black people get crippled, murdered, etc., the maids risking their lives, Skeeler with her secret and failing love life with Stuart; it all kept me on my toes. Most characters are deep and rich. Skeeler, and her parents (while her siblings are mostly absent). Aibileen, the 2-to-4 year old little girl she takes care of, and her mum Elizabeth Leefolt; Minny and her children and husband, plus her neglected boss Celia Foote, and her husband; the evil Hilly Holbrooke, a centrepiece in the town’s social structure and extreme separatist. Each and every one of them credible, strong characters, whom I liked to see saved or disappear.

It all ends well, by the way.

The book has, so one reads in the end, strong autobiographic parts. But “The Help” is not the book that Aibileen and Skeeler write, “Help”. I’d love to read that… But until that book is found, “The Help” I consider to be a highly recommended read.