By: Alexi Ralston

        The Help had been on the top of my to-read pile for the past year, begging to be revisited after reading it for the first time back in 2013. Four years after its debut in 2009, The Help had resonated with me in my early teens, having been the first real “grown up” novel I ever read. Back then, I was sold on Stockett’s story of an aspiring author who managed to spark a revolution using nothing but her pen and her vague desire to “change things” in Jackson, Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement. Oh, and of course, she had the voices of a dozen or so Black housemaids, the women who actually tell the stories that Skeeter Phelan, twenty-three and white as the cotton on her family’s plantation, types up into one neat manuscript. Skeeter sacrifices lifelong friendships and her social status as she vows to bring light to the hardships that the Black maids deal with at the hands of their white employers, making her an admirable protagonist as she begins to use her privilege for the benefit of others.

        The Help is a complicated book. Admittedly, I felt some of the warm, fuzzy feelings that Stockett wanted to stir within me. She features three narrators, two black maids named Aibileen and Minny, who reveal the mixture of pain and love that goes into their jobs, along with Skeeter, who dreams of becoming a journalist and finding love. Aibileen is a middle-aged black woman who tends to white families’ children while dealing with the loss of her own son, while Minny is young and feisty, often facing consequences for speaking her mind. Stockett does a wonderful job of crafting characters who feel like friends hiding within the pages of the book, inviting the reader to feel the sadness and joy along with them. However, rereading this book in 2020, I cannot help but feel that the Black characters were used as a vehicle to propel Skeeter’s narrative forward. Aibileen and Minny certainly develop as characters throughout the novel, but their growth is a product of Skeeter’s book. For all the good that Skeeter does for the maids, it is disappointing to read a novel that uses dynamic, loveable characters for the sole purpose of advancing the career aspirations of a white woman.

        Kathryn Stockett knew that publishing The Help would put her in an uncomfortable spotlight, tackling the subject of race which Americans have historically avoided. In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, Stockett spoke on this silence, saying “we [Americans] were so afraid of saying the wrong thing and being typecast as racist. In order to get better at something, you have to practise and we haven't been practising at all”. Stockett revealed that one of her inspirations for writing The Help, her debut novel, was her own experience growing up with a Black nanny, a woman named Demetrie. While she felt connected to Demetrie, Stockett acknowledges her inability to completely engage with someone whose identity is far different from her own: “I would never claim to know what that experience was like. It's impossible to know what she felt like, going home to her house, turning on her black-and-white TV. And I'm not saying I feel sorry for her, because she was a very proud woman”. Choosing to focus on the elements of identity that she shared with a Black nanny, Stockett thus focused her book on themes of womanhood, friendship, romance, and family, paired with the Civil Rights-era ideology that “lines between black and white ain’t there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago”.

        The Help is beautifully written, but Stockett falls short of achieving the theme of racial solidarity by trying to tell the stories of complex, Black characters through the narrow goals and aspirations of a white woman. While the civil rights movement is certainly prevalent throughout the novel, Stockett focuses much of the narrative on Skeeter’s love life with a politician’s son and her social relations within the Jackson Junior League, a club of white women who donate time and money to the Poor Starving Children of Africa while treating Jackson’s own Black population with contempt. Hilly Holbrook, Skeeter’s childhood friend, exemplifies the most hateful attitudes of white women toward the help as she pushes forward with her Home Help Sanitation Initiative, “a bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help”. Hilly’s complete lack of empathy for the Black maids contrasts with Skeeter’s genuine affection for the Black maids, and her efforts for the help to be treated more fairly lead to the death of her social life and her romantic relationships as she fights for her cause. On its own, Skeeter’s narrative is inspirational—but only for a white, female readership. It seems as though Stockett did not fully consider how the rest of her readers would respond to such a whitewashed happy ending.

        I can appreciate the feel-good moments interspersed throughout the novel, but after rereading The Help through the lens of Black Lives Matter and racial tensions in America in 2020, this book does not make me feel good. Instead, I’m left feeling that Stockett should have told a different story if she truly wanted to elevate Black voices in a novel. Ultimately, this novel is a call to white women to change the injustices of the world they live in, reminding us that their struggle is minimal compared to the labor that Black maids endure every day. Skeeter is fresh out of college with no work experience, yet Elaine Stein, a New York publisher (and a white woman) takes a chance on her because “someone once did it for me.” Aibileen, Minny, and the other Black maids are only successful when Skeeter succeeds, reaffirming the familiar message for Black readers that they are not in charge of their own narrative because a white voice will always be dominant. Perhaps the worst part is that Skeeter’s main motivation for telling the maids’ stories is not her desire for Black women to be treated as equals to white women, but because she thinks this is her only way to secure a job at a New York publishing company. Despite the maid’s fears for their personal safety, Skeeter presses on with her novel, dreaming of escaping Jackson to start her own life, often forgetting how the maids will be impacted by the book as well: “I’ve been so wrapped up in my own self, it hasn’t occurred to me that Aibileen might be as thrilled as I am that an editor in New York is going to read her story”. These moments of honest realization reveal the areas where Skeeter still needs to grow, but the trajectory of her success as a writer implies that the story is unaffected whether or not Skeeter’s own views of the Black community change for the better. When Skeeter finally gets the opportunity to leave Jackson, she worries about leaving the maids behind, knowing that she is taking their voices with her to New York. To that, Aibileen says frankly, “Bad things gone happen whether you here or not”, reminding us that the fight for civil rights is only just beginning -- this story takes baby steps towards making an actual difference.

        The Help was once praised for its optimism in closing the divide between Black women and white women, but in recent years, the book has been criticized as a "white savior" narrative, giving more power to the white woman while the Black women are left anonymous, voiceless without the white voice that spoke their stories for them. Following the novel’s 2009 publication, reviewers commended Stockett for her lovable characters and hopeful message, such as Janet Maslin for The New York Times: “It’s not the black maids who are done a disservice by this white writer; it’s the white folk. The two principal maid characters, the lovingly maternal Aibileen and the angry, scrappy Minny, leap off the page in all their warm, three-dimensional glory.” I agree that Stockett’s characters are lovely, and both Aibileen and Minny are often more likeable than Skeeter, who has taken twenty four years to realize that other people have greater problems than her own. However, eleven years after the book was published, critics are more concerned with what happens to the Black characters rather than who they are, because at the end of the day, it is their race that inhibits them throughout the story.

        Stockett ends her book on a note of hopefulness that Aibileen and Minny will be able to build better lives for themselves after receiving money from Skeeter’s book profits. However, as we have seen after the summer of 2020, including the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, hope alone cannot win the war. The Help does nothing to empower Black voices, instead upholding the long held belief that only white voices can create hope, which has led to a dangerous attitude of white supremacy. Vann R. Newkirk for The Atlantic discusses how the Trump presidency has stoked the fires of white supremacy by reminding Americans how white people still hold control over the nation: “White supremacy is framed as a broad concept, one where wielding racism or benefitting from it, even in its subtler forms, earns one the mark.” As Black Americans continue to fight against systematic oppression, we need to steer away from literature which promulgates white supremacy. Although I highly doubt that Stockett ever meant for The Help to become associated with white supremacy, the connection is not so far fetched when you realize that Skeeter only narrates one-third of the book, yet the entire novel advances her story through the contributions of Black women, all who realize that Skeeter’s voice is their only hope of salvation. 

        One of the most troubling aspects of the novel is the immediate use of dialect, beginning in the first chapter narrated by Aibileen. Immediately, this dialect suggests that Aibileen is less educated than the other characters, even less than Minny, whose chapters are narrated in more proper English. Stockett admits how Aibileen’s dialect was written in the voice of her own Demetrie, confessing, “I was mortified that I was doing the very thing I'd been taught not to do, which was to touch on the issue of race, to highlight the things that separate us. I'm still thinking I'm going to get into trouble. I'm still not comfortable with what I've done.” This statement caused conflicting emotions when I first read it; I’m all for taking risks in writing, but if writing in a dialect of African American English as a white person made Stockett feel that she might face consequences, she probably should have avoided using this voice altogether. The usage of this dialect suggests that Aibileen is less educated than Skeeter and even Minny (whose speech is only mildly shaped by a dialect), which degrades the fact that Aibileen is one of the wisest and most knowledgeable characters in the novel. Stockett also tends to fall back on tropes that undermine the complexity of her characters, such as her negative portrayal of black men in Leroy’s character, Minny’s husband who is usually drunk, always angry, and beats his wife the hardest when he is “stone-cold sober.”

        There was one question that stayed on my mind while I was reading this novel: is it possible for a white woman to tell a Black woman’s story without being criticized, or worse, racist? Must she forget everything she knows about her own identity, or should she avoid the challenge altogether? Here, I raise a possible answer: she can embrace her identity as a white woman, yet she must educate herself on Black literature in order to hear Black voices on their own, without any influences of white narration. The amplification of Black voices increases each year, and in the eleven years following the publication of The Help, Tayari Jones has become one of these prominent voices. Jones’ An American Marriage, published in 2018 and awarded a coveted spot in Oprah’s Book Club, focuses on themes of black domesticity and romantic relationships through the ways that human emotion and societal expectations of Black Americans can either make a marriage stronger or result in a marriage’s destruction. Similarly to The Help, An American Marriage switches between three narratives: Roy, a Black man who was wrongfully incarcerated for rape; Celestial, his wife who is an aspiring artist; and Andre, Celestial’s best friend and Roy’s college pal. Between these three narratives, Jones explores the multifaceted roles of husband and wife in conjunction with being a Black man and a Black woman in modern America. This narrative is much different from the way Stockett represents these themes in The Help as singular, often negative aspects of a Black woman’s life, where domesticity is a Black maid’s priority both at work and at home, where she is either abused by her husband or has been left to live alone.

        Of course, Jones has the advantage here: as a Black woman, she can see what goes on behind the closed doors in a Black household, in contrast to Stockett’s upbringing which kept her separated from the private elements of her nanny Demetrie’s life—such as Demetrie’s private bathroom, which Stockett did not even know existed until after Demetrie had passed away. The Help attempts to overcome this separation by focusing on universal human themes that can unite Black and white women, such as love, faith, and hope for a better future. While Stockett’s optimism is heartwarming, it minimizes the reality that many Black Americans in poverty are not afforded a second chance at life like Aibileen and Minny, who were given this “freedom” out of the kindness of a white woman’s heart. An American Marriage shows us how Roy and Celestial, who are upper-middle class Black Americans, get caught up in the American prison system despite having done nothing wrong. After Roy’s eventual release, the concept of freedom troubles Celestial, who has realized that Roy’s freedom makes her feel trapped within their marriage. Jones allows the complexity of her characters to develop into a rich story, as Roy and Celestial fight for two different versions of their second chance at life. Whereas The Help lends itself to a clean happy ending, Jones creates optimism in spite of the messiness of life. Roy says it best when Celestial asks if the two of them can start fresh: “‘I don’t want to start fresh. I want to start real.’”

        The Help explores the history of racism but stays silent on all of the ways that racism is still alive and well in America, ending on a note of hopefulness that lacks any sense of reality. The white woman gets to go off to New York and start a new life, leaving her hometown as a land of opportunity for the Black women to forge new paths for themselves. Skeeter gives Aibileen a job and Minny the financial security to leave her abusive husband, but what about the other women who made her novel possible? She might leave them with a cut of the book’s profits, but all Skeeter does is skim the surface of the civil rights movement. Apart from passing references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington, The Help fails to engage in a meaningful discussion of civil rights, revealing that this novel belongs to white women more than it does to Black women. Unfortunately, this book is not the social change novel that it aspired to be. 

        This novel may have lost its heartwarming charm over the years, but The Help serves to teach us that white authors should be held accountable for their representation of Black characters, no matter what year their work was published. In 2020, we can no longer allow for Black characters who are boiled down to a single trope or forced into a white narrative. If a white author is ready to step up to the task, they should start by reading Black literature, where Black voices have the power to create their own narratives.