Reviewed by Sybil Steinberg
Southern whites' guilt for not expressing gratitude to the black maids who
raised them threatens to become a familiar refrain. But don't tell Kathryn
Stockett because her first novel is a nuanced variation on the theme that
strikes every note with authenticity. In a page-turner that brings new
resonance to the moral issues involved, she spins a story of social
awakening as seen from both sides of the American racial divide.
Newly graduated from Ole Miss with a degree in English but neither an
engagement ring nor a steady boyfriend, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan returns to
her parents' cotton farm in Jackson. Although it's 1962, during the early
years of the civil rights movement, she is largely unaware of the tensions
gathering around her town.
Skeeter is in some ways an outsider. Her friends, bridge partners and fellow
members of the Junior League are married. Most subscribe to the racist
attitudes of the era, mistreating and despising the black maids whom they
count on to raise their children. Skeeter is not racist, but she is naive
and unwittingly patronizing. When her best friend makes a political issue of
not allowing the "help" to use the toilets in their employers' houses, she
decides to write a book in which the community's maids -- their names
disguised -- talk about their experiences.
Fear of discovery and retribution at first keep the maids from complying,
but a stalwart woman named Aibileen, who has raised and nurtured 17 white
children, and her friend Minny, who keeps losing jobs because she talks back
when insulted and abused, sign on with Skeeter's risky project, and
eventually 10 others follow.
Aibileen and Minny share the narration with Skeeter, and one of Stockett's
accomplishments is reproducing African American vernacular and racy humor
without resorting to stilted dialogue. She unsparingly delineates the
conditions of black servitude a century after the Civil War.
The murders of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. are seen through
African American eyes, but go largely unobserved by the white community.
Meanwhile, a room "full of cake-eating, Tab-drinking, cigarette-smoking
women" pretentiously plan a fundraiser for the "Poor Starving Children of
Africa." In general, Stockett doesn't sledgehammer her ironies, though she
skirts caricature with a "white trash" woman who has married into an old
Jackson family. Yet even this character is portrayed with the compassion and
humor that keep the novel levitating above its serious theme.
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