We’re going to Jackson

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock

Kathryn Stockett, the author of “The Help,” tells us at the end of this novel, that she grew up in Jackson, Miss., and was raised by a black maid named Demetrie. She confesses that she never thought once about asking the woman who bathed her, fed her, comforted her, and told her she was beautiful what it was like for Demetrie as a black woman in Mississippi born just prior to the Depression.

She apologizes for that. This book is her apology to Demetrie.

The novel is told in first person, present tense. Most chapters are told from the points of view of Skeeter, a tall, gangly white girl recently graduated from Ole Miss; Aibileen, a wise black woman tending to her seventeenth white child; and Minny, a say-what-she-thinks black woman, who, although an excellent cook, loses job after job because of her sassy mouth.

The time is the early sixties in Jackson. Medgar Evers is shot in his driveway, James Meredith enters the University of Mississippi, Negro churches are bombed, and Martin Luther King is planning a march in Washington, D.C.

But most of the white, newly married women in town, anxious to take their places in the Junior League, are oblivious to the disparity that exists between themselves and their black maids. It is a time when it is impossible to know if the affection between a white woman and her black maid is honest or simply pragmatic.

Everyone smokes. Women light up at the bridge tables, the league meetings, the country club swimming pool. The surgeon general’s announcement of the dangers of smoking hasn’t sunk in yet. Life magazine is making the grand and glorious state of Mississippi look like a depraved hell-hole with Negroes being shot and killed left and right. And everyone knows that colored folks don’t really mind working for a white person, especially when they are treated like one of the family, albeit with a toilet in the garage and a cot in the kitchen when they have to stay overnight.

Skeeter hopes to become a journalist, so she accepts a job at the local newspaper as a fill-in for Miss Myrna’s Household Advice column. Of course she knows nothing about running a household, so she asks for assistance from Aibileen, the maid of a good friend.  At first, Aibileen doesn’t want to help Skeeter because she feels it isn’t fitting for a black woman to tell a white woman what’s what. But eventually she agrees and offers advice on everything from how to use a potato to get a broken light bulb out of a lamp socket to how to clean the ring from around a man’s white shirt collar. And that it’s tacky to dip silver instead of polishing it.

Skeeter and Aibileen build a tentative friendship, and when Skeeter begins to see and respond to the way in which her friends treat their help, she decides to write about the experiences black women have as employees of white women.

At first, Skeeter has trouble getting black maids to allow her to interview them. The maids are afraid they’ll lose their jobs if anyone finds out. Skeeter promises anonymity, and she soon has Aibileen and Minny meeting her in secret at Aibileen’s home. And it is here that Skeeter hears of undisguised hate for white women, as well as inexplicable love.

This book will certainly make more than a few women squirm. Maybe some men will feel uneasy also. For those of us who entered adulthood in the fifties, sixties, and even seventies, it will make us wonder what our black sisters and brothers thought about us.

The times, they are a changin’.

•••

Sherron Shuffield, a friend of mine, recommended I read this book. She lived in Jackson with her husband, Charles, before they moved to Fort Smith where he became administrator of Sparks Hospital. She says the book accurately depicts Jackson the way she remembers it in the early sixties.

Her husband worked at the Mississippi Baptist Hospital, and she taught English at Murrah High School. She shopped at Jitney Jungle, where she often saw Eudora Welty, the most famous female writer of the South.

When their first baby was born, a wonderful black lady, Mrs. Berry, came and helped them for two weeks get oriented to being parents. That was her only experience with “help” in Jackson.

A voracious reader of good books, Sherron is now reading Alexander McCall Smith’s newest, “The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday,” and a book recommended by her daughter, Sally, “On the Divinity of Second Chances,” by Kaya McLaren. She’s also reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frankl, a book she’s read several times before, in preparation for a Sunday School lesson she’s giving at The First Methodist Church.

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