Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
The book is mainly in 3 different points of view:
Aibileen, a black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Whose son died while at work while the bosses looked the other way.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend. She’s the best cook in the county but always says what’s on her mind and doesn’t put up with anything so she is constantly looking for another job with 5 children and an abusive husband at home.
Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is the only white characters point of view that we read from. She comes back from College only to find that her beloved maid that was treated like “family” is no longer there and no one will talk about it. Aspiring to be more than just a housewife, Skeeter decides to write a book called “The Help”. Written in the point of view of black maids containing good and bad stories of how the black maids are treated and raise the white children of their employers.
I’m not one for really liking To Kill a Mockingbird. Whether it be because we had to read it in school or because the writing just didn’t jive with me. The Help on the other hand was LOVELY.
The Story takes place in the time where Blacks aren’t quite still the slaves that people own, but slaves since the whites still look down upon them. Where White people still think that you can catch a disease from a Black by using the same toilet/clothes. Where you don’t think about what you say to them or around them as they are just a piece of furniture.
The book has a wonderful writing style that goes over the course of time very accurately with Skeeters deadline and doesn’t really get bogged down with details. I actually laughed out loud at a couple parts with Minny and was shocked to read about certain parts. Were we really that mean to these people? Did we really think we could get infectious diseases from using the same hand towel?
The only thing is, I wished the book went on longer :)
Excerpt from the Book:
The kitchen is about half the size of the living room and warmer. It smells like tea and lemons. The black-and-white linoleum floor has been scrubbed thin. There's just enough counter for the china tea set. I set the typewriter on a scratched red table under the window. Aibileen starts to pour the hot water into the teapot.
"Oh, none for me, thanks," I say and reach in my bag. "I brought us some Co-Colas if you want one." I've tried to come up with ways to make Aibileen more comfortable. Number One: Don't make Aibileen feel like she has to serve me.
"Well, ain't that nice. I usually don't take my tea till later anyway." She brings over an opener and two glasses. I drink mine straight from the bottle and seeing this, she pushes the glasses aside, does the same.
I called Aibileen after Elizabeth gave me the note, and listened hopefully as Aibileen told me her idea--for her to write her own words down and then show me what she's written. I tried to act excited. But I know I'll have to rewrite everything she's written, wasting even more time. I thought it might make it easier if she could see it in type-face instead of me reading it and telling her it can't work this way.
We smile at each other. I take a sip of my Coke, smooth my blouse. "So . . ." I say.
Aibileen has a wire-ringed notebook in front of her. "Want me to . . .just go head and read?"
"Sure," I say.
We both take deep breaths and she begins reading in a slow, steady voice.
"My first white baby to ever look after was named Alton Carrington Speers. It was 1924 and I'd just turned fifteen years old. Alton was a long, skinny baby with hair fine as silk on a corn . . ."
I begin typing as she reads, her words rhythmic, pronounced more clearly than her usual talk. "Every window in that filthy house was painted shut on the inside, even though the house was big with a wide green lawn. I knew the air was bad, felt sick myself . . ."
"Hang on," I say. I've typed wide greem. I blow on the typing fluid, retype it. "Okay, go ahead."
"When the mama died, six months later," she reads, "of the lung disease, they kept me on to raise Alton until they moved away to Memphis. I loved that baby and he loved me and that's when I knew I was good at making children feel proud of themselves . . ."
I hadn't wanted to insult Aibileen when she told me her idea. I tried to urge her out of it, over the phone. "Writing isn't that easy. And you wouldn't have time for this anyway, Aibileen, not with a full-time job."
"Can't be much different than writing my prayers every night."
It was the first interesting thing she'd told me about herself since we'd started the project, so I'd grabbed the shopping pad in the pantry. "You don't say your prayers, then?"
"I never told nobody that before. Not even Minny. Find I can get my
point across a lot better writing em down."
"So this is what you do on the weekends?" I asked. "In your spare time?" I liked the idea of capturing her life outside of work, when she wasn't under the eye of Elizabeth Leefolt.
"Oh no, I write a hour, sometimes two ever day. Lot a ailing, sick peoples
in this town."
I was impressed. That was more than I wrote on some days. I told her we'd try it just to get the project going again.
Aibileen takes a breath, a swallow of Coke, and reads on.
She backtracks to her first job at thirteen, cleaning the Francis the First silver service at the governor's mansion. She reads how on her first morning, she made a mistake on the chart where you filled in the number of pieces so they'd know you hadn't stolen anything.
"I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it."
Aibileen looks up to see what I think. I stop typing. I'd expected the stories to be sweet, glossy. I realize I might be getting more than I'd bargained for. She reads on…
Don't forget to check out the movie that comes out August 12th, 2011
Featuring: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastin.
http://thehelpmovie.com/us/
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