The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, published by Penguin, £12.99

Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel is brave, exciting and very, very good. After a hectic time with the Poetry Festival, I needed one of my quiet Sunday’s reading, and picked this off the bookshelves on the strength of the first paragraph: I wasn’t disappointed. Set in the first half of the sixties in the racial powder keg of Jackson, Mississippi, this is a story told in three voices: two black maids, and the white woman who decides to try to tell their story. Right there Kathryn Stockett faces up to all kinds of difficulties. Each of the main characters gets to tell the story from their own viewpoint, and while I can’t fault the different viewpoints explored, what doesn’t quite come off for me is the actual differentiation of those voices. In my opinion, the best writer of voice is Barbara Kingsolver – her five-voiced Poisonwood Bible never has me turning back to the beginning of a chapter to check who was talking as each voice is so perfectly pitched as to be always recognisable. In The Help though, the two maids, Aibelline and Minnie, sound just a bit too similar, and even Skeeter, the white woman writer, isn’t always distinguishable from the other two. Having said that though, it may be that my English sensibilities are not quite finely tuned enough to catch the nuances of black and white southern dialect, and I must also admit to being really surprised to find out that Stockett is herself a white woman writer: the only other time I have had that kind of shock is when I was reading the first of the Precious Ramotswe novels and having no idea that Alexander McCall Smith was a man! In other words, I’m quite prepared to give Stockett the benefit of the doubt, and say that the difficulty might lie with my hearing rather than her enunciation.

The second difficulty Stockett faces is the question of whether or not it is acceptable for a white woman to yet again be telling a black woman’s story. This dilemma is addressed within the novel, and also in Stockett’s notes at the end of the book where she wonders whether she “was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.” She goes on to say that she thought she had said both too much and too little, and her greatest fear was that she would fail to describe a situation that had been so “grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.” I’m more than glad that she took these risks, as what we get is a reworking of the Gone with the Wind type of Mammy-figure, with the maids’ lives being fully realised rather than caricatures. The complex and intricate relationships between black and white women whose lives are intimately entwined but utterly imbalanced in terms of power, are drawn in ways that force us to think again.

The book is very culturally specific, with references to Kennedy’s assassination; Martin Luther King’s world changing march on Washington and the death of Medgar Evers (who lived in Jackson and was a prominent member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The coming of flower-power and peaceniks, the war in Vietnam, even fashion and food, are thrown carefully into this melting pot to recreate the time and the place with vibrant and telling authenticity.

Stockett is obviously drawing on her own family background – she was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, looked after by a black maid, and went on to live in New York as a magazine writer. This book isn’t The Color Purple (Alice Walker), nor is it Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) but it is in the same family and not-too-distantly related. She has told a great story – I hope there will be more.

Anna Dreda

Wenlock Books