The Help Is Deeper Than it Looks

l-r: Emma Stone as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, and Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark

As I left the theater this afternoon, my head was swimming with impressions. Get home before all these thoughts disappear.  The movie was this close to being as good as the book.  If I were a white woman from 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, I would be pissed.  The Oscar buzz I’ve heard about is justified – at least to an extent.  Ensemble acting is tricky, but when done well, it rocks.  For the first time I can recall, a story has been told that ends with the heroic and inordinately brave African American women in triumph and the powerful, intransigent and deeply imbedded racism trounced, if only for that fictional moment in time.


I am not a white woman who lived in the 60s Deep South, but I am an African American woman with plenty of white relatives who visited Jackson, Mississippi at precisely that time in history.  In fact, I was with a group of white students from Wisconsin who drove down to visit Tougaloo College, a place that played a somewhat prominent role in this just-released movie based on a novel I listened to on audio books several years ago. It was superb in every way.

This screenplay nailed the tiniest details of Jackson at the time Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he walked toward his front door carrying an armload of t-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.” His two small children saw it all.  It was June 12 1963.  On November 22 that same bloody year, JFK suffered the same fate, largely for the same underlying reasons.

This movie played up the comical parts of the book to the point that I thought the white characters bordered on clownish.  At first.  On second and subsequent thought, maybe not.  Yes, they appeared vapid and shallow, prejudiced and ignorant, petty and well, useless.  But as I drove home I realized just how brilliantly the authors of the book and screenplay delivered the women of that time in all their multi-layered splendor.

Ron Howard’s little girl, Bryce Dallas Howard, delivered the character of Hilly –a mean-spirited, equal-opportunity bully of her Junior League cohorts and unabashed hater of Negroes – that put a sharp point on what it must have been like to be a white woman of the time and place.  Not all the women in her clique were willing accessories to her antics, but they were cowed by her brash brand of leadership.  American women in general didn’t have a hell of a lot going for them back then, so most of these ladies were fearful of losing whatever social status their affiliation with the dreadful Mrs. Hilly Holbrook afforded them.  Bryce Dallas Howard turns in an award-willing performance of a woman so opposite Ms. Howard’s actual persona, she is virtually unrecognizable.

Academy Award nominee Viola Davis of Doubt fame, should dust off a spot on her mantel because I feel another Oscar nomination in her future.  She portrays the lead maid role and serves as the first narrator of the story.  In heartbreaking nuance, Ms. Davis succeeds in showing through Aibileen Clark the total confusion a woman in her position dwelled in every day of her life.  She raised “her babies” from birth to their own parenthood.  They loved her more than their own mothers.  She figured out a way to teach them self-worth because their mothers were too busy and self-possessed to raise them properly.  Yet the man of the house would barely acknowledge her presence.  And when “her babies” became adults, they were expected to turn on her just as their own mothers had turned on the black women who raised them.

In her uneducated dialect, Aibileen taught her last baby to repeat a mantra whenever she felt scared and alone:  'I is kind. I is smart. I is important.”

Watching the scene in the “colored neighborhood” as a couple dozen uniformed black women boarded Jackson city buses to their respective white employers’ homes, I felt them mentally preparing themselves to leave behind whatever issues and concerns their own children were battling and walk into ten or more hours of quiet deference and swallowed pride.  Then I wondered if they even knew what pride felt like, since their entire existences seemed to have fear as the foundation.

I remember a mixture of shame and pride in the voices of my up-North neighborhood friends whose parents did domestic work or, as they would say, “worked for the white folks.”  The shame came from not being able to do any better due to lack of educational opportunity and poverty in most cases. The pride came from the tokens of  white love the women would take home in the form of cast off clothing, sometimes even mink coats.

Men who served a Pullman porters were revered in my ‘hood, even though the work still included bowing and scraping to traveling white folks in fancy railroad cars.  That probably has more to do with the fact that they were males than anything else.

My biggest concern over this poignant story, this history of my own times, is that people who didn’t live it because they are too young will not understand the profound distance Americans of African descent have covered in a relatively short time.  I worry that the comedy, which is laugh out loud quality, will diminish the grim reality of Jim Crow laws and institutionalized hatred.

There should be no shame left in the story of domestic workers who endured shameful indignities, like not being allowed to use the indoor toilets in their employers’ homes, in order to survive and make better opportunities for their flesh-and-blood children.  A woman who lived this life was every bit as much a hero as Rosa Parks.  And the women in The Help will make you stand up and cheer.

 L in the Southeast 2011