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<\/a>My airport reading while I took in the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood at the end of April, was Kathryn Stockett\u2019s The Help.<\/em> I always try to pack along a book that I suspect will be a real page-turner when I\u2019m traveling to see me through those long waits in air terminals and the flights themselves in which, while a plane is zooming across a continent, passenger time inside the craft proceeds at a snail\u2019s pace. The Help<\/em> did not disappoint. In fact I found myself rushing back to my hotel room after the final screening of each day just so I could sink into Stockett\u2019s book until my eyes refused to continue focusing and I went to bed.<\/p>\nBorn and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Stockett revisits the city of fifty years ago during the troubled years in which African Americans and their white advocates fought for civil rights in a South largely determined to thwart the movement. A very scary time for the black population and those who supported their cause. In particular, Stockett examines the lives of women working as housemaids in Jackson. Often, as they raised their own children, they were also the true mothers to the white children in the homes in which they worked.<\/p>\n
Stockett allows her novel to unfold in three voices. There is Aibileen, who lives by herself after the tragic death of her son. She is getting on in years and has developed a close bond with the little girl she tends in a home presided over by a woman who would sooner spend time with her sewing machine than her daughter. \u00a0Aibileen\u2019s best friend, Minny Jackson, a black woman with a lot of attitude, several children and a husband who\u2019s a mean drunk, is the second voice of the book. Minny is not without her own means of wreaking vengeance on a bridge-playing biddy who has gone out of her way to make her life miserable. The third voice is Skeeter, a young white woman whose father operates a cotton plantation and whose mother has seen fit to dismiss the maid who had raised Skeeter.<\/p>\n
Skeeter, caught up in the bridge group and the Junior League, yearns to be a writer and, for a foot in the door, takes on a newspaper assignment offering household tips to homemakers. The only problem is that she has no clue about how to remove sweat rings from a shirt collar or how best to polish silver \u2013 so she presses Aibileen into providing her with the answers she needs for her column. In the process, though, she begins to become aware of the soul-destroying treatment her friends and family have meted out to their black help.<\/p>\n
Skeeter pitches a book project to a New York publishing house in which she offers to record the stories related by a dozen maids about their experiences working in white households. It is a project that must be carried out clandestinely and tension builds as Skeeter\u2019s circle of friends and acquaintances become aware that she\u2019s up to something \u2013 they\u2019re not too sure what. Aibileen and Minny and the other maids who agree to reveal their stories are also on tenterhooks. These are the days of dissidents being murdered, of people disappearing, of help being summarily dismissed and blacklisted if they are even suspected of being agitators.<\/p>\n
Stockett has a wonderful ear for Southern dialects and she manages to brand the voice of each of the three narrators in The Help.<\/em> Both Aibileen and Minny observe their worlds with a keen sense of irony and their language is earthy and funny. Maybe the deck is a little stacked with Skeeter being virtually the only white person we have sympathy for in the novel \u2013 except for the children. But with a story as hair-raising and touching as The Help,<\/em> it\u2019s easy to forgive a stacked deck.<\/p>\nMy Movie Pick: The Long Walk Home<\/h1>\n