The Help

This is an entertaining and also poignant story of courage in the face of racial oppression in Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. During the Jim Crow days prior to and on the precipice of the Civil Rights movement, the black housekeepers and maids raised the children of elite white families and cleaned their houses. However, they were expected to use a separate bathroom (“Negroes carry different diseases from white people”), eat from separate dishes, and refrain from opinions on racial inequality. Crossing boundaries could lead to fines or imprisonment, or even death. It is from these indignities that “the help” are aided by a budding, brave, young white journalist named Skeeter.

Told in separate voices in alternating chapters–Abileen, Minnie (two black maids), and Skeeter–the author is able to give an unvarnished view of social injustice and the individual lives it affected in the Deep South. Through Skeeter's clandestine meetings with twelve black maids, the stories of their lives are culled covertly from in-depth interviews with these women. Over a period of several months, she sets out to complete an intrepid but protectively anonymous profile of a town and time under siege of segregation. But she took some brazen risks by including material that was specific to Jackson and its inhabitants. Skeeter plans to submit her finished book to an agent in New York, risking alienation from friends and family and even criminal prosecution if her identity (and the identity of the maids) is discovered.

I am extremely behind the times with this one because I am reading it way after all the hype has settled but I loved it. if you read the authors note at the end of the book then you know that the author had a maid she was very close to, and that wraps the story up even tighter for me. I love authors who can make something so relatable that I can not put it down.