The Help, Kathryn Stockett

After reading (and loving) Kathryn Stockett's The Help I was shocked to learn that the novel was rejected by publishers 60 times before becoming a bestseller. I'm glad Stockett was persistent (or as she puts it, stubborn) enough to keep trying and get this book published.

The story is told from the point of view of colored maids, Aibileen and Minny, and the white woman who wants to tell their stories, Eugenia Phelan, better known as Skeeter.

The Help is set in the turbulent early 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi. The Help presents us with a hypocritical time when white people simultaneously loved and shamed their colored help. It was a time when the Help were part of the family, yet they weren’t allowed to sit around the dining room table to eat the meal they cooked; instead they were required to eat separately in the kitchen. The maids raised white children but were forced to use separate bathrooms for fear they might spread disease.

 “We all know about these laws,” Skeeter says of the Jim Crow laws, “we live here, but we don’t talk about them. This is the first time I’ve ever seen them written down.”

While the issue of civil rights is certainly not a new topic, and the treatment of African-Americans in this time period is not news, what’s refreshing about this book is the relationships between the characters. Skeeter’s decision to write a book from the point of view of the Help is a risky one, but one that ultimately brings the women together in a way they never would have otherwise known. They crossed the line drawn between the white side of town and the colored side to tell the stories that needed to be told.

We see Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child whom she affectionately calls Baby Girl about whom Aibileen says “I know, deep down, I can’t keep from turning our like her mama.” We see the pain in raising a white child only to have her grow up to be just as racist as her parents:

“I see her listening to Miss Leefolt call me dirty, diseased. I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain’t a color, disease ain’t the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming – and it comes in ever white child’s life – when they start to think that colored folks ain’t as good as whites.”

Stockett examines the "lines," between blacks and whites, between maids and the families they work for. Minny says, "Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn... I know they there cause you get punished for crossing em. Least I do."
In response, Aibileen says: "I used to believe in em. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain't…”

Readers will fall in love with Minny for her tell-it-like-it-is attitude and Aibileen for her nurturing side - in the end, she feels like a mother to all us.


For her debut novel, Stockett took on risky subject matter. The result is a story that will draw you in and stay with you long after you've put it down.

After reading the book (twice) I’m left with something Aibileen said about the “lines” we draw between us. Lines we still draw today: for example between the rich and the poor, lines that exist simply to make us believe some of us are better than others. But we’re all people, and just as Aibileen tells Minny: “All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries."