The Help

I've been reading "The Help," a novel about Mississippi in the early 1960s, most of it from the point of view of African-American maids. It's by Kathyrn Stockett, who happens to be a white woman--right away we could question the veracity of the book.  But, it is not a flattering portrait of the South, or at least of the white people who employed African Americans to raise their kids and do their cooking while the white women played tennis and shopped.

I worked in a school cafeteria while attending the University of Tennessee from 1965 to 1968.  Most of the people I worked with were African-Americans.  They just kept their heads down, didn't talk, and while they were kind to me, I never got to know any of them because there was still the big divide between whites and blacks.  They didn't want to be my friend, which was hard for me to comprehend at the time because I didn't feel like I belonged with my own kind either. They never got angry, always smiled and acted polite, and I suppose I believed that was simply who they were, not that they were forced to pretend that they had no needs.  One of the biggest scares we had in the dorm was when a young white woman claimed she'd been raped right around the corner by a huge black man.  At the time, we were terrified, of course, until it came out that this girl was a liar and had made the whole thing up for attention.

UT was a place to find a husband for the sorority girls with whom I dormed.  Despite the fact that it was an inexpensive state school (which was why I was going there because I could work my own way through it), there were many, many wealthy young women.  One of my suitemates was the rich daughter of the head of Pepsi-Cola.  They were all in sororities, went through rush season, attended lots of drunken parties.  I was either back in the dorm studying or making pizza in the cafeteria snack bar.  I couldn't afford to be in a sorority, nor would I have had any skills for the role anyway.  I suppose many of those beautiful young women could have gone on to be the heartless women in "The Help", except that times were changing then.  It was a mere few years before the Black Panthers raged onto the national scene after all the violence against blacks, including Metger Evers in Mississippi, and Martin Luther King just a few years later.

I've always been fascinated by the fact that, once women's liberation became another focus in politics, it was the black women who seemed to burst from their female roles with more gusto than we white women.  I was pretty blind to my own stereotyped behaviors and I thought I was already liberated.  I'd grown up as my father's daughter, able to shovel entire driveways after blizzards, work like a pack animal, and earn my own living.  I was a journalist, for Pete's sake--surely I was liberated. I didn't realize that my mouth had been sewn shut. I was middle of the road, a bit afraid of bra-burning women with big mouths and tons of anger.  I already had my rights, after all, or so I figured.  It took me years to realize that I quelled all the anger around me, including my own, with brownie slabs and apple pie.  I cooked to remain safe.

I think black women were not as asleep as the rest of us.  It didn't take them long to figure out that they were being used as lowly help.  I recently met an elderly woman from Mississippi who was very upset by "The Help."  She said something like, "Mother was always kind to our maid. Why, when she had a party at her own house, Mother let her borrow all the good china."