The Help

Katheryn Sockett's first book is a highly readable story of women in a turning point of American and particularly Southern history. Women caught on both sides of a cultural divide. The most obvious divide that is still there today is the racial divide. Black and White. But there are other divides, rich and poor. Of course the maids are stuck on the poor side but we also see Miss Celcia, white trash that married above her station struggling with the lines that Aibileen comes to realize are just in our heads. Also the rich white girl Skeeter toes another line of the time. She is not settling down, marrying and having a brood of her own that will require Help to take care of. Her mother wonders if she my be a lesbian and has her drink a specially brewed tea to cure that possible tendency. Because Skeeter is questioning her own expected place in society she is able to look around her in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi and question the order. And in the 1960's the world had their eyes on Mississippi and their struggle at time with violent and ugly results to keep traditions from crumbling into a new era without Jim Crow.
Being from Little Dixie, the only part of Oklahoma that is actually Southern in culture. I was able to recognize some of the characters. Things in the world had changed by the time I was growing up in the 70's and 80's but not that much. Integration on the surface was a fact, I know that there was a Black school in my town but it was closed down by the time I was school. So I grew up with Black classmates, but I cannot say that I really had any black friends--I had to wait until college for that to happen. No reason really other than it just wasn't done. I was friendly with my Black classmates but my circle of friends were just like me, lower middle-class Whites.
Conitinuing with my thoughts, I was raised by a mother with an open world view. When I came home from schoool telling my Mom about the poor Soviet children with no choices that I learned about, she quickly let me know that what I was hearing was propaganda and that the Soviet children were more like me than not. My mom told us of her Black friend in Conroe, TX that used to come and go by the back door no matter how my mother asked her to enter like her other friends. But her friend said that it was better her way, would rumple feathers in the town over either one of them, I am sure. My mother often cited that trash and decency comes in every color, no culture, color or creed has a monopoly on either one.
But I also grew up in a tense time, our little town had a race riot incited by the appropriately named Willie Warhop, half Indian, half Black and pure thug. For three days the school was closed, my younger brother and I were shipped off to the country, a good man and cop, Rueben Farmer, lost his life and countless building burned down all over an incident that happened at the nortoriously trashy nightclub Black Cat.
My father 10 years older than my mother, had different sensiblities. In basic terms he was racist. But wrapped up in thatknee jerk racism of his era, he befriended people who were worthy of friendship. One junior officer Earner came to call my mom and dad just that Mom and Pop. Heads would sometimes turn in the store with this very black man and my parents would exchange greetings in stores. I have a special place for Earner in my own heart. During the rough rough week that my mother called me back to Idabel so I would have have a chance to say goodbye to my father who was fading fast, he lasted less than 5 more weeks, Earner came by and spent some time with my father. During a time when my father wishfully mistook me for my sister, and confused things in the present with the past, Earner gave me a glimpse of the man my father was before the illnesses consumed him. He laughed and his eyes crickled in a way that I only had a memory of, only Earner, sitting at the kitchen table, that bleak November evening, was able to bring my father back for a glimmer.
Somethings change and some stay the same. Bi-racial relationships are still frowned on in my town and probably across much of America. They happen but no one seems to like them. A friend's sister and her Asian husband and mixed children moved to Hawaii from South Carolina in search of a more welcoming environment. Perhaps it is no mistake that our first African-American president is from Hawaii. It's not that racism doesn't exist in Hawaii. It does. When a co-worker and I overheard another co-worker explaining to a student that Hawaii wasn't racist, we jumped all over him. What was he talking about, Haole's, Flips, Japs, Local this and that, etc. Local author's Lois Yamanaka's are often banned on the mainland for containing blantantly racist dialogs. Our co-worker amended his statement to "Well, Ok, we are equal opporunity racist in Hawaii." That I would agree with and perhaps that is our hope. Race is recognized along with the often cultural nuances that goes with it, but it generally doesn't get in the way of letting people live their lives.