The Help

Jane Minett - guest reviewer

This blog post is the first written by an invited contributor.   

My friend Jane Minett was telling me how much she enjoyed the book The Help, and I thought "why not have this articulate and thoughtful woman write a review for the blog?"  

Jane loved the book.  She's promised to lend it to me, and I can't wait.  

Here's the review:

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, takes place in Mississippi in the early 1960s when segregation is still the order of the day, and any white family who could afford it hires “help” to attend to the domestic chores -- cooking, cleaning, looking after the children.  The irony is that these “coloured” maids, who looked after the complex running of a household and were trusted with the care of their employer’s precious children, weren’t considered worthy to enter by the front door or to use the family toilet.

The Help is written from the perspective of three remarkable women.  One is white, a young woman just graduated from university, who aspires to be a journalist.   She returns home from school to find her beloved Constantine, the maid who raised her from a baby gone, summarily dismissed by her mother with no explanation or apology.  We see her entering a vacuous world of Junior League meetings, bridge clubs, and small-town gossip.

The other two women are maids, both black. One is a kind, gentle, middle-aged woman; the other is older, wiser, more cynical, and often has trouble remembering “her place”.  We see both the black world and the white world from the perspectives of these “invisible” and previously silent black women.  Everything is pretty much as it’s been since the Thirteenth Amendment freed the slaves.  Or is it? 

Enter the Civil Rights Movement.  Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Meredith.  You can feel the tension of the impending collision of the segregated south and the mere idea of civil rights.  So how does that translate to the ordinary everyday lives of the maids and the families they work for in small town Mississippi?

This is a story of maids, an idealistic aspiring journalist, and their friends.  Of hope, of justice, of bravery, and the determination of ordinary people who do extraordinary things.

I have heard this book compared to To Kill A Mockingbird.  That’s a fair comparison because The Help also evokes the deep south at a time when something important was about to happen.  You can almost feel the intense humid heat.  It’s also beautifully written with engaging characters and a real sense of place and purpose.  It was hard to put down.

I highly recommend this book.  

Mighty Jerome

I liked this movie documenting the life of Canadian sprinter Harry Jerome.  Jerome exploded out of Vancouver to a world record in the 100 yard dash in 1962 when he was only 19, and set a total of 7 world records over his career.  He irritated the press by rebuffing a request for a picture at the Rome Olympics.  When he later pulled up with a hamstring pull in the finals, the press were delighted to declare him a quitter, a label which adhered for years.  Jerome did have a great career at University of Oregon, got gold medals in the Commonwealth and Pan American Games, and a bronze and fourth place in the next Olympics and came back to compete at yet another Olympics after totally rupturing his quadriceps muscle and having a tricky operation to reattach it to the ligament.

The movie took place against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in the US.  While at Oregon, Jerome married a white girl from Edmonton who was studying there and struggled against racial discrimination.  However, when he was interviewed on CBC with his contemporary the white sprinter Bruce Kidd after the Black Power salute by two American athletes at the Mexico Olympics, Kidd was much more supportive of the demonstration than Jerome.  At one point in the interview Kidd turns to Jerome and asks why Jerome's being so moderate, when Kidd's passion on the subject had arisen mostly from Jerome's anecdotes about his own treatment.

In the movie people described as quiet and withdrawn, but also with the cocky confidence that he could run the fastest of anybody in the world.  He was definitely an interesting study in contrasts.  There is a track meet named after him and an award honouring black athletes but many Canadians don't know much about him, so this movie should address a lack.

The black and white movie did a great job of knitting together archival film into a seamless whole.  In the Q&A, the director said he'd used 5 cameras for different parts of the film.

Five Smooth Stones

Five Smooth Stones, a 1966 book by Ann Fairbairn, is another book I picked up on the Not Wanted table at our local regatta.  The book felt like a historical novel of a far-away time - and yet I was in university at the time of its publication (funny how that's happening more often these days).

The book traces the life of David Champlin, a black man born poor in New Orleans through his education in the North (liberal arts college followed by Harvard Law) and his ultimate involvement in the civil rights movement. 

It was a time when Coloured and Negro were both acceptable descriptors.  Older black people were focused on surviving in the divided Southern society, teaching their children to avoid any possibility of confrontation, to keep their eyes downcast around whites.  Blacks were barred from many public buildings, parks, pools, schools; more importantly they were blocked from registering to vote.  Blacks and whites are mutually distrustful.

Yet, David becomes the protege of both black and white people, and falls in love with a white girl.  The love story is interwoven throughout the novel.  Their relationship is unthinkable in the south and more importantly in David's mind, even though he meets couples of mixed race in the North.

The reality of the book felt so distant from our situation today.  It's not that everything is smooth and easy for blacks today, but you'd be hard pressed to find people to argue that blacks should be denied access to the fruits of civil society as they were back then in the South.

The book also made me wonder if we sometimes misjudge the significance of events in our own time.  In Five Smooth Stones, there are many mentions of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist assassinated in 1963, but only a glancing mention of the contemporaneous March on Washington led by Martin Luther King.  If this book was your sole source of information about the civil rights movement, you would never guess how deeply the "I have a dream" speech is engrained in our psyche, nor that the Americans have named a holiday after Martin Luther King Jr. 

One other thing that really struck me, apart from the inordinate amount of smoking and drinking (liquor and instant coffee) that everyone indulged in.  It was that a book evangelizing civil rights and equality could have such a medieval attitude toward homosexuality.  Champin is almost driven out of the liberal arts college he attends through the evil machinations of a racist dean.  And how does he attack Champlin?  With an accusation that he is gay.  Being gay was worse than being black.  And when the dean is ousted from the college, it is because he himself is proved to be gay.  You can fight for human rights for one category of humans, and yet not generalize such rights to all humans.

I didn't consider this a great book.  Far too often, I could guess where the plot was leading.  The good characters were just a little bit too good, and the bad characters were really bad.  The latter part became a bit sermonistic and many of the descriptions of the activist events were rather convoluted and hard to understand.  Nevertheless, I was fascinated by its depiction of that era and  it kept me turning the pages for over 900 pages, so I guess it couldn't have been that bad.