The Help

It has been awhile since I have blogged – sorry about that. Life has been very full for a spell, but I am back and I will try to write a little more often.

The Help

After going to the theater to see the movie version of The Help, I got to thinking about the many themes running through this movie and what popped into my head first was a quote credited to author Amy Tan, something she shared with her fans long before Kathryn Stockett wrote this amazing book.

Amy Tan wrote this about power and fear, “You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.”

Something to think about…..while you’re watching this thought provoking movie.

Quotes

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
(Aibileen to Mae Mobley)

“Ugly isn’t something on the outside, but something that grows up deep inside you.”
(Constantine to Skeeter)

“Am I going to believe all them bad things, them fools say about me today?”
(Constantine to Skeeter)

Plot Summary

It’s Mississippi in the early 1960s - back in the days when girls were encourage to go to college for the purpose of getting a husband, blacks and whites did not use the same water fountains, restrooms, or eat at the same soda fountain counter, and for years southern black maids had been devoting their working lives to caring for upper and middle class white children, raising them more than the actual mothers in some cases and loving them like their own - only to have them grow up to not want to use the same water fountains, restrooms or eat at the same soda fountain counter with them.

The exception to this stereotype was Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan recent graduate of Ole’ Miss who spent her time studying instead of “husband hunting” and graduated from college with the hopes and dreams of becoming a writer and making a difference.

Diploma in hand, Skeeter moves back home, but home, her friends, and Skeeter’s views on life have changed in the four years she was away. All her friends are married and having children and the woman who helped her mother raise her, the family’s African American maid Constantine was gone with no explanation. Skeeter starts asking questions, but the answers aren’t forthcoming.

Enter Aibileen Clark, a middle age African American maid, who has raised and loved a child of her own named Treelore and more than a dozen white children in the various households she has worked in over the years. Mae Mobley is the latest child in her care.

In the opening of the book we learn three things about Aibileen – her husband is no longer in the picture, she has lost her adult son, and, like Skeeter, her view of the world has changed since her son’s death – she too, is less accepting of the “old Jim Crow” way of doing things. But in the time period this book takes place in it was better for an African American to “hush and accept,” - to not do so could get your house burned down or speaking out, like Medger Evers and Martin Luther King, could cost you your life.

The Help is about education, mending fences, and friendship. Mostly it is about courage and doing what is right even when it would be easier not to.

Less you think this book is all drama and no comedy – there are more than a few scenes that will make you smile, and at least two that will give you a belly life – I promise.

Life Lessons

I don’t like bullies or people who use their power to push other people around. Some animals do this, they find “what they consider” a weak member of the group and they will try to cull them out to strengthen their pack and if that doesn’t work, they might even gang up and rip the weak one to pieces. I have seen women do this, occasionally in one to one interactions, but more often in group situations, it’s ugly, it’s ignorant, and I wish we, as a gender, would set a good example and stop participating in it. It takes courage, especially when all we want to do is fit in with the pack, Actually it takes lots of courage to stand up for what is right, it’s easier to “go along” and that’s what most people do.

There’s a book, a good read with lots of good advice in how to be a good human. People have been reading it for centuries and here is one of my favorite quotes from it

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.” (Matthew 25: 40)

Those are more than just words written in a book we open up on Sunday – it is a way to conduct your life so you can look yourself in the mirror on the last day of your life and honestly say – I might not have been perfect, but I did the best I could.

The Help Movie Cast

• Emma Stone as Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan
• Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook
• Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark
• Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson
• Mike Vogel as Johnny Foote
• Allison Janney as Charlotte Phelan
• Chris Lowell as Stuart Whitworth
• Jessica Chastain as Celia Foote
• Sissy Spacek as Mrs. Walters
• Ahna O'Reilly as Elizabeth Leefolt
• Brian Kerwin as Robert Phelan
• Leslie Jordan as Mr. Blackly
• Dana Ivey as Grace Higgenbottom
• Cicely Tyson as Constantine Bates
• Mary Steenburgen as Elain Stein
• Anna Camp as Jolene French
• David Oyelowo as Preacher Green
• Lila Rogers as Young Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
• Emma Henry as Mae Mobley
• And Others