The Help
[This article was submitted by John from Phoenix as a comment to a recent article, but since it addressed a new topic, I have chosen to feature it as the first guest commentator article here at Sense. I may select future comments for use as separate articles, and encourage any readers to send other article ideas to me by E-mail.]
I am currently reading (listening to an audio book) "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. My wife put me on to it. Her story takes place in Jackson Mississippi in the early 60's at the time Medgar Evers was murdered. Although she lived in Jackson, her picture makes her too young to have been alive at the time Edgars was killed.
Nevertheless, I am captivated by her story. Her main character is a white woman only 23 years old, possibly modeled on herself. Her character convinces a few black maids to tell her stories of their experiences that she hopes to publish. She describes the pressure that the "help" feel in doing this which could cause physical harm and certainly economic harm if found out. She also describes the fear the protagonist feels in losing the esteem of her society and the romantic interest of a budding politician she has fallen in love with.
Her story seems a fantasy. What black woman at that time would risk her economic and physical life to a 23 year old idealist? But that is the story of the civil rights movement: many blacks risked everything. After all, Martin Luther King was a martyr.
posted by Tom Blake | 9:11 AM
1 Comments:
I am adding this book to my list. I remember the Mississippi writer, Shelby Foote, saying in an interview in his twilight years how he only lately realized how much the Southern white society he grew up in depended on the reliable and loving work of African-Americans. An interview with Kathryn Stockett, at Book Reporter, includes similar sentiments.
The civil rights workers of that era, and African Americans in the South who were open to their appeals, were definitely courageous, and at a time when mainstream white society, even in the North, was not supportive. As national television news coverage became quite popular, the images of vicious attacks on civil rights workers in the South and reporting of murders like that of Medgar Evers began to change the attitude of Northern whites, and was reflected in the passage of Federal Civil Rights laws a few years later.
My own experience during those years was somewhat unique, a white youth raised in a black community in the North. I did not see black elders as domestics, but as adults and parents of my play mates, deserving of the same respect owed all our elders. Though I was working for a black attorney in Seattle at the time of the passage of the Civil Rights laws, and some local civil rights leaders did visit our office from time to time, our office was not involved in that kind of work.
I do remember the ship scalers union across from our office had mostly black workers born in the South, who had never been given birth certificates, which was a problem when they were applying for Social Security retirement. I had to deal with white Southern bureaucrats to put together enough evidence to convince them to issue a delayed birth certificate. One particularly obstinate bureaucrat, from Missisippi I think, sent back a certified evidentiary document that had taken me a long time to obtain and told me some piece of information on it was wrong and I had to "change it". The information was actually irrelevant, but the scoundrel wanted to put me back through the time consuming process of recertification. Instead, I waited a discreet week, then altered the document to correct the irrelevant error, and sent it back saying "I changed it". Not a particularly courageous act on my part, but it worked and the client was pleased to be able to retire.
One of the joys of operating my own law office years later was having several of the neighborhood adults I grew up respecting choose me to help them with their legal affairs.
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