Author – Kathryn Stockett
Publisher – Penguin Books
First published – 2009
Rating – Awesome
Here is a simple book filled with light hearted humour and heart warming moments dealing with the complex issue of apartheid in a newly free society.
Written in a style I was personally new to – it is an autobiography of the book. It added a fifth dimension to the already vivid book.
The other side of “Gone with the wind”, “The Help’ is about confidences. Set in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi, the book is about what domestic helps - all coloured in this case encounter. Slavery has ended, the lot of the black people is better, they get paid, their children go to school, and they have their own homes. However with race triggered white backlashings like beatings, lychings, branding and even shootings, equality is still a dream.
The women have gumption, I give them that. The coloured and the whites. A battle of the males is quick. A woman’s battle is long drawn.
Aibileen is a gentle coloured maid who has raised 17 children in town. She fights apartheid in her own way. By teaching the little ones of kindness and equality and love. Minnie is a sassy maid, but because her cooking is great, she still manages to get hired. The woman, become the unwitting leaders of their community when they decide to take a bold step -to contribute their stories for a book.
The stories of these women could be of domestic helps anywhere in the world. The employers want them to be like elves. Magically doing all our work without making any demands and better without being seen.
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| The help sits on the floor. Thats the way its been! |
On the other side of the fence are the white women. The white women of the South stick together. They fight wars through their clubs, benefits and balls. The ring leader is Hilly. An autocratic woman who believes in the segregation of white and coloured race.
When Euginia, a close friend shows integrationist tendencies, she uses all arsenals in her kitty – exclusion from various clubs, eviction from posts, cold shoulder from friends, even telling on her boyfriend, to intimidate her former friend.
However, Sheeter as Euginia is known to friends and family has something else to fill her empty space. She is onto a project. A project with the househelps under aliases of course, recording their testimonies on the white ladies they serve.
At first there is reluctance. Skeeter has to work hard to win Aibileen’s trust. Aibileen has to work hard to get Minnie to trust Skeeter. But when Hilly gets her maid thrown in jail for a petty theft, the other maids too decide to include their testimonies.
So stories are told and eccentricities are recorded. The separate bathroom for helps drive by Hilly, how a white lady is too caught up in herself to even love her child, the failed attempts of a poor white woman now married to a rich white man to join the genteel women society, the cleaning of the help's hands with bleach. There are good stories as well. White women going out of their way to help a maid’s son injured in racial clashes, white woman defending her maid from a pervert with a fire poker in hand.....
The woman hope that something good will come of this book. It is not a way of getting back at their employers but to cast the helps in a human light, something the employers would prefer to forget.
In a scenario where I myself employ a help at home, I cannot but empathise with the white woman sometimes. After all we are all at the mercy and whims of our bai’s. But these bai’s and mausi’s have a life and want to be treated as equals. Would we treat them so?
Indian households even today segregate utensils used by their help. The help generally sleeps in the kitchen. Their clothes are stowed away in some corner. How are we to let them lead the lives of decent humans if we are to maintain our superiority and thus make them do our dirty work see?
At work we want our holidays, lunch breaks, bonus, notice periods, the occasional office trip or picnic. But for the help to have these perks? Hah... who will do the work then?
Imagine if your maids came out and wrote a book about you ladies!! OMG!!
Even speaking for myself I have a long road to go.....
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| Our Kaamwaali bai. |
