The Help Merited a Few Choice Memories of How Far Our Country Has Come

As a writer, my second love is reading.  I read everything from cereal boxes to the classics.  I think I just finished reading a classic.  The Help was captivating, not only due to its subject matter that touched close to home, but because of its riveting portrayal of black women in the south during the most turbulent moments in American history.  It was an era when I was a child confused by the images of violence, confused by the differences made to people of color, and even deeply frightened by the confusion.  Yet, at the same time I was excited about the future and all its possibilities. 

My mother, my grandmother, and many of the women in my family had earned meager livings serving others in their homes.  Some of whom they developed life-long loving relationships with and others they lived through to tell tales of abuse, some not too unlike those told in The Help.  As a southern child whose first best friend was a little white girl whom I still call friend, I lived through blows of racial discernment because of that friendship.  The first time I realized there was a difference in us, other than her uncle’s terms of endearment calling us chocolate and vanilla, was when her cousins came to visit one day.  While playing house, they wanted to make me the maid.  Even then I knew I was going to be more than that, so I refused and went home.  Over the years though having learned what to expect from some, and having grown even stronger in my own expectations, I was again asked to become a maid in a high school play.  I was told there was only one role for a black female.  Again, I refused. I had wanted to audition for one of the other roles, not the maid and since I wasn’t allowed to that, I didn’t see a point in playing the maid. 

The Help stirred up a lot of memories as I read it, the earth shattering images of the Birmingham church that was bombed, destroying the lives of four innocent children was one.  Another was the images that gave us all hope, the massive swell of people marching on Washington for equal rights.  Kathryn Stockett deserves all the accolades she is receiving as the pictures she painted were alive as well as the strength exuded by those maids who had had enough, a statement of that era when African Americans and people of all colors were saying, “Enough.” 

Dilsa Saunders Bailey, author of Dreams Thrown Away