Sierra Armstrong

Dr. Reeves

Cultural Anthropology

22 November 2011

The Help

I chose to read the book “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett basically because of the movie that was made about it. I hadn’t actually seen the movie but I wanted to, so I decided to go ahead and read the book and then watch the movie. I decided to write about both groups the book focuses on: the black maids and the white families they look after, because I couldn’t make a decision on which was more important. Each group is just as important as the other. I couldn’t understand why these maids would let these white women treat them the way they do. Before reading this book I had a general idea about how things worked down South in the Sixties; black people were treated as they were inferior to white people. Although that was the stereotype of everybody down there, I still thought that there were some good people who didn’t treat differently because of their skin color. Luckily when reading “The Help” there were some characters who were “good”, and went against what was socially accepted.

“The Help” is a book written about Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s. It is about a group of black maids who have been persuaded by a white socialite named Skeeter to write a book about what it is like to work for white families. Skeeter has come back home from college with a degree but no place to work. Upon her return she finds out that her families long standing maid, Constantine, has disappeared, and no one will tell her what happened. While writing this book with the maids Skeeter slowly loses her white friends because she starts realizing how wrong the maids and actually the black race as a whole is being treated. She ends up finding real friends in the maids who are helping her write her book. The maids risk everything to help Skeeter write this book. They risk losing their current job and possibly any more after that. Not only do the maids take a risk in writing this book, Skeeter does too. She risks causing shame on herself as well as on her family. After the book becomes published and quite successful Skeeter finds about what has happened to Constantine. She finds out that her mother basically fired Constantine and went to live with her daughter in Chicago. After only being there a couple of weeks Constantine dies. Skeeter lost a best friend, but made a dozen more from the maids who wrote the book with her.

In Skeeter’s culture, the white culture, a lot of the women rely on each other to survive. They thrive off of the others failures. If one woman has on an awful outfit or gets a bad haircut the other women are just ecstatic about how much they other is in pain. They are so happy just because it is not them who is in the “bad spotlight”. For instance, in the book, Hilly, who is the popular white ladies in town, has an initiative called the “Home Health Initiative”. This concerns the segregation of the bathrooms for blacks and whites. Hilly say’s that everybody needs another bathroom outside the house for the help, so the white families won’t get any diseases from the maids. If you do not have an extra bathroom you were in the “bad spotlight” in Hilly’s eyes. The ladies think that because Hilly says this then it must be the way it should be. I think that even though this is the norm for most people in that culture, it is not technically correct. There are also some learned behaviors for each of the two groups in this book. I think that the white ladies treat their maids this way because it wasn’t long ago that their families actually owned black people as slaves. They learned that the slaves and maids took care of pretty much everything. They cooked the food, cleaned the house, and watched after the children. Some of the women may not feel that this is right or they may even want to take care of their own families, but for so long this has been the way it is.

In Aibileen’s and the other maids culture I think they have accepted publically that they are inferior to white people just because it is easier to deal with. The maids do what their bosses say even if it is degrading or demeaning. If they did not do what was said then they could and probably would be fired, put in jail, beaten, or even killed. I also believe that they take care of and raise the white families children because deep down they hope that the children will turn out good, and not like their Momas and Deddys. “You is kind, you is smart, you is important” is what one of the maids, Aibileen, would tell the child she was looking after. The child didn’t get loving from her own mother. I think that the maids put up with the way they are treated because of how they might feel if they didn’t do anything for the children. If the maids didn’t give any loving to the children then who would. Just like the white women had learned behaviors on how they should treat maids, the maids had learned a thing or two about how to act and treat the white ladies. Overtime the book turned into a symbol for the maids. If this book would be published then hopefully the white people would read it, and see how they are really acting from a different perspective. See how another culture thinks of them.

Slowly throughout the book Skeeter starts changing her mind about how her culture is basically the dominant culture. Well at least they think they are so they act that way. Even though it takes a lot of the book going through the maids stories for Skeeter to change her mind she still changes it fairly easily which is known as plasticity. The book becomes a project for her so that hopefully she can change the minds of some of the white women on how they treat black people. She is like an outsider even though it is her own culture.