My Book Pick: The Help

My airport reading while I took in the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood at the end of April, was Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. I always try to pack along a book that I suspect will be a real page-turner when I’m traveling to see me through those long waits in air terminals and the flights themselves in which, while a plane is zooming across a continent, passenger time inside the craft proceeds at a snail’s pace. The Help did not disappoint. In fact I found myself rushing back to my hotel room after the final screening of each day just so I could sink into Stockett’s book until my eyes refused to continue focusing and I went to bed.

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Stockett revisits the city of fifty years ago during the troubled years in which African Americans and their white advocates fought for civil rights in a South largely determined to thwart the movement. A very scary time for the black population and those who supported their cause. In particular, Stockett examines the lives of women working as housemaids in Jackson. Often, as they raised their own children, they were also the true mothers to the white children in the homes in which they worked.

Stockett allows her novel to unfold in three voices. There is Aibileen, who lives by herself after the tragic death of her son. She is getting on in years and has developed a close bond with the little girl she tends in a home presided over by a woman who would sooner spend time with her sewing machine than her daughter.  Aibileen’s best friend, Minny Jackson, a black woman with a lot of attitude, several children and a husband who’s a mean drunk, is the second voice of the book. Minny is not without her own means of wreaking vengeance on a bridge-playing biddy who has gone out of her way to make her life miserable. The third voice is Skeeter, a young white woman whose father operates a cotton plantation and whose mother has seen fit to dismiss the maid who had raised Skeeter.

Skeeter, caught up in the bridge group and the Junior League, yearns to be a writer and, for a foot in the door, takes on a newspaper assignment offering household tips to homemakers. The only problem is that she has no clue about how to remove sweat rings from a shirt collar or how best to polish silver – so she presses Aibileen into providing her with the answers she needs for her column. In the process, though, she begins to become aware of the soul-destroying treatment her friends and family have meted out to their black help.

Skeeter pitches a book project to a New York publishing house in which she offers to record the stories related by a dozen maids about their experiences working in white households. It is a project that must be carried out clandestinely and tension builds as Skeeter’s circle of friends and acquaintances become aware that she’s up to something – they’re not too sure what. Aibileen and Minny and the other maids who agree to reveal their stories are also on tenterhooks. These are the days of dissidents being murdered, of people disappearing, of help being summarily dismissed and blacklisted if they are even suspected of being agitators.

Stockett has a wonderful ear for Southern dialects and she manages to brand the voice of each of the three narrators in The Help. Both Aibileen and Minny observe their worlds with a keen sense of irony and their language is earthy and funny. Maybe the deck is a little stacked with Skeeter being virtually the only white person we have sympathy for in the novel – except for the children. But with a story as hair-raising and touching as The Help, it’s easy to forgive a stacked deck.

My Movie Pick: The Long Walk Home

As I was reading The Help, I found myself thinking about a movie that came out twenty years ago – The Long Walk Home. The two presentations have much in common, although the film is not laced with the humor we find in Stockett’s book. Which is a little odd, considering Whoopi Goldberg’s success with comedy (although, of course, she’d shown her acting chops five years earlier as Celie in The Color Purple). Not as funny as The Help, but an equally incisive and touching look at the plight of Negro workers and their families on the cusp of the drive for civil rights. Like The Help, it also offers a parallel story of a well-heeled white woman won over to that cause.

In The Long Walk Home, Goldberg portrays Odessa Carter, one of the African American maids who chooses to undertake a lengthy walk to her daily job rather than ride public transit during the bus strike instigated by Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. The scenes of Odessa trekking to work, on her feet all day as she cooks and cleans, then walking home, her feet blistered and bleeding, only to tackle what still needs to be done at her own home are heartbreaking. We can feel the pain.

Odessa works for Miriam Thompson (played by Sissy Spacek), who would have fit right in with Skeeter’s bridge-playing buddies. The maid has a soft spot for Miriam’s little girl, Mary Catherine, but Spacek turns out to be more of a mother than we find in the white households of the Stockett novel. At first, Miriam finds excuses, as she runs errands, to offer Odessa rides, but as the strike drags on, she joins those in Montgomery who dedicate their time and their vehicles to chauffeuring the strikers to and from their jobs. Tension rises as we wait for her bigoted husband and brother-in-law to figure out what’s going on. We know it’s not going to be pretty.

Whoopi Goldberg brings a striking dignity to the role of Odessa, a woman who, along with her husband, raises their children to live with compassion and care in a world that has often been remiss in returning these qualities. There is love, and a moral backbone, but there is also relentless poverty and, at almost every turn, the bigotry of white segregationists — a bigotry that escalates into savagery in one scene as Odessa’s daughter is chased across a park by white hooligans.

The film contrasts the Carter home with the Thompson house-beautiful — all gleaming floors and appliances, fireplaces and pile rugs. Sissy Spacek does a marvelous job of suggesting just how empty these trappings become as she watches and then becomes involved in the huge civil drama occurring beyond her doorstep. The performances of both Goldberg and Spacek are nuanced, understated – probably their intuitive way of approaching the characters they play; but we may need to give some credit to director Richard Pearce who helmed this 1990 picture. Pearce and his cinematographer, with a keen eye for period detail, manage to give the film a color and texture that captures a 1950s feeling.

The Long Walk Home is framed by the narration of an adult Mary Catherine (effectively voiced by Mary Steenburgen) remembering the time of the strike in 1955 and how it changed their lives. I was reminded of the voice-over that so beautifully frames another story of the south during a time of racial strife – To Kill a Mockingbird.

As I write this, The Help is being shaped into a film for a release later this summer. While you wait for it to come out though, treat yourself to a look at The Long Walk Home if you’ve never seen it – or a second look if you have. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better way to spend a couple of hours.