Domestic worker in Atlanta, probably in the 1950s. Photo from National Women's History Museum. In Stockett's novel, Aibileen is the only consistent source of care and training for her employer's bright but plump and unattractive toddler. Aibileen affectionately calls the child "Baby Girl," while the toddler's tense mother, worried about pleasing the bridge club, usually just shrieks "Now, Mae Mobley!" when the child irritates her. Aibileen knows Mae Mobley's mother doesn't like the child, and Mae Mobley knows it too. Aibileen tries to teach her charge what the exhausted white working-class single mother in Tillie Olsen's short story "I Stand Here Ironing" also wants her daughter to know: “that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”
The recorded version of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help was my recent companion while commuting to work. As everyone knows by now, this enormously popular novel, set in Mississippi in 1962, is told from the point of view of black domestic workers who risk confiding in a white character, Eugenia (“Miss Skeeter”) Phelan.
In the frame story, Skeeter, a recent graduate of Ole Miss, returns home to find her mother upset that Skeeter hasn’t found a husband, now that she’s practically a spinster. ”Four years at college, and what do you have to show for it?” Skeeter’s mother wails. ”A degree?” offers Skeeter.
Bored with bridge parties and the Junior League, Skeeter tries to get a job at the local newspaper, but the only position available to her is writing a weekly column about housekeeping, for token pay. Skeeter, who grew up with household help, has no idea how to keep house, so she turns to Aibileen and Minny, her friends’ maids, for information. For most of the novel, Skeeter remains puzzled about what happened to her beloved nanny, Constantine, who was her own family’s help for Skeeter’s entire childhood.
Skeeter ends up learning much from Minny and Aibileen about the segregated world. She also becomes more aware of the difficulties and injustices these women face daily, and of the social changes brewing nationwide. She submits a manuscript about it to Random House, with the anxious consent of Minny and Aibileen.
Meanwhile, Minny, Aibileen, and Skeeter all struggle to stay clear of the town’s queen bee, Miss Hilly, and Miss Hilly’s dreadful mother. These two are perfect villains: spoiled, petulant women who, like the despicable Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House, are bent on furthering their own ambitions by raising money for starving children in Africa, while ignoring the dire but less politically useful social needs in their own community. Their snobbery extends to class as well as race, as shown by Hilly’s snubbing of Celia, a white woman from a lower class background. Yet Hilly’s opportunities are also limited: in a later time, she might have aspired to be a corporate officer or to run for a political post. In her time, she can only boss the Junior League and assist in her husband’s campaign. She maladapts by becoming a “mean girl” who grows into a mean woman.
For Skeeter, the consequences of crossing Hilly are simply annoying: being forced to resign her post in the Junior League, and being talked about behind her back. For the black characters, being caught crossing the line poses the potential for far more serious and lasting dangers. As Aibileen observes, were her employer, the frantic and dithering Mrs. Leefolt, to learn that “the help” were telling their stories to Skeeter, the methods of retaliation would be no less devastating for being indirect: ”No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches’ fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.” Aibileen knows that she risks getting fired with a negative reference that will prevent her from getting another domestic position, the only kind of job open to her.
To say more would be to spoil the novel’s surprises, including its ending.
A repeated criticism of Stockett’s book is the way her black characters speak. In a February 18, 2009 review, New York Times writer Janet Maslin complains about the “thick, dated dialect.” The novel is set in 1962. I am quite sure Stockett heard exactly these accents (Skeeter’s and the maids’, too) in her native Jackson, Mississippi, before accents country-wide became more media-neutral. I heard these accents, too, when I was growing up. Stockett certainly does not portray “the help” as persons to ridicule. To the contrary, Minny, Aibileen and their peers come across as brave, strong, capable, and generous, in spite of the constraints and indignities they face every day.
The dialects Stockett employs for Minny and Aibileen tell the reader at once who they are: poor southern women, whose race and economic situation have shut many doors to them, including the doors to the school and even the public library. This is one of the many injustices that Stockett underscores in the novel. I flinched when I first heard the nearly forgotten idiom on the audiobook, not because the speech itself was grating (to the contrary, its cadences instantly soothe), but because it was so accurate, and all it implied was so true. The historical accuracy of something doesn’t necessarily make it less painful to remember or contemplate from the changed perspectives of a more inclusive time. But the speech itself is marvelous: vital, imaginative, and musical. I see Stockett’s use of it as an act of preservation, employed as a literary device in much the same way as Dickens’ use of broad Cockney dialect for many of his memorable characters; or as Zora Neale Hurston’s masterful use of dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God. (The audio version of this work, read by Ruby Dee, is unforgettable).
In the audiobook of Stockett’s novel, the characters’ voices come through as rich and mellifluous (at least to my southern and perhaps dated ear), in the inspired performances of Octavia Spencer, as Minny; Bahni Turpin, as Aibileen; and Jenna Lamia, as Skeeter. The performance won the Audible Audiobook of the Year award in 2009.
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