August 8, 2011 • Category: Blog
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The current issue of Entertainment Weekly (August 12) has a wonderful cover story on The Help, the blockbuster book that was made into a movie, opening soon. As part of the photo-heavy spread, Entertainment Weekly asked Algonquin author Martha Southgate, whose new novel The Taste of Salt publishes 9/27, to write about the book. Her piece is below. Be sure to pick up a copy of the magazine–one of our favorites around here–on newsstands now.
Tags: civil rights, Entertainment Weekly, Kathryn Stockett, Martha Southgate, racial issues, The Help, The Taste of Salt
Rachel Kubie says...
Yes, the premise of this novel underlines a real white american pychological issue with our American past–the white narcissism that we can’t really put aside. We deeply need a way to address this directly, and we haven’t found it yet. The fantasy of white superheros of the civil rights movement has some kinship to the fantasy of the “kind father” image that slave owners developed for themselves–you still hear this in the south, and it includes the creation of an image of the oppressed as childish and unable to care for themselves. I don’t want to disparage the impulse to join the fight for another group’s freedom–to turn the peacecorp urge into simple girlscout childishness, but we have to find a way to look at an honest picture of our history as a country.
The basic circumstance of the novel, the (troubled) love that rose between women working as domestics and the children they cared for, is very rich ground. The child’s love would have been entirely innocent and unconditional (and totally unaware of their own privlege), and the adult woman’s love must have been quite difficult sometimes, since many of them had children they couldn’t spend so much time with, who wanted for so much that their charges simply took for granted. I commend the novel for creating a psychologically palatable way to open more conversation, and hope that it might lead to deeper exploration of the history of our relationships and their power. I know the reason that this has become such a choice for book groups, especially in the south, is that so many white women still have such loving memories of their nannies, and have a need to reconnect with the maternal love and comfort of those memories in a way that doesn’t do the damage that real political evaluation of those relationships would do.
August 9, 2011@ 9:21 AMValerie says...
I read The Help because its premiss so closely mimicked that of an actual book written in the mid-70′s about black domestics in the deep South. That book was interview formatted like the fictional one Stockett’s Skeeter character wrote. I wish I could remember its title, but I’m guessing it’s long out of print by now. It featured the auto-biographical accounts of relationships between several (10 or more, if I recall correctly) black maids and their white employers. While reading Stockett’s book, I wondered if she might actually have read that book, as her fictional maids’ accounts strongly reminded me of those I read in it. Skeeter’s book hypothetically was written and published approx. a decade before the one I read, but I didn’t think it stretched fictional plausibility. I really enjoyed Stockett’s book and felt it was well-written, but I do wonder if a similar book would have received such fanfare had it been written by a black author. I rather doubt it, actually. Btw, many of my female relatives (mother, aunts, and grandmothers) worked as black domestics for at least short periods of time, and I remember sitting and listening to their accounts of what it was like “working for white women.” Many times, Stockett’s characters’ accounts were spot on.
August 9, 2011@ 1:03 AMBookslinger says...
I have found this book flawed from the beginning……but I am eager to see the movie, if only to send a message to Hollywood: YES! We’ll pay to see a primarily African American cast in a first-run film.
August 8, 2011@ 10:36 PMDiego says...
I call it the “bug under the jar”–approach. White writers/moviemakers have an enduring fascination with what makes black people tick–right down to trying to mimick how “they” speak, walk, etc, and a fetish for putting themselves at the center of the greatest story of triumph over adversity in U.S. history. It’s as if the glory of the Civil Rights struggle is just too good to leave to the true heroes and heroines.
Try as they may in the movie trailers for “The Help” to infer that the film is about the black characters, we know that it is really the young white woman’s tale, the only reason Hollywood has ever seen for making a movie set in the Civil Rights Era.
The question is whether the implication of such an approach–that white readers and movie-goers are so hopelessly racist that they could never embrace a narrative that didn’t have them at the center–is an accurate one even in 2011?
August 8, 2011@ 7:33 PMLee Levin says...
Hi Martha,
I totally agree. I cringed when I saw the previews. Not on my list–I prefer Aliens and Cowboys.
August 8, 2011@ 4:39 PMHonoree Jeffers says...
I’m Black, southern, and the granddaughter of a former domestic. I’ve been wanting to read The Help while dreading it at the same time.:-) I’m going to read it because I’m seeing the movie this week. The problem is not the subject matter of the book/movie; class differences and racial apartheid were a reality of the South. The problem is that whenever most White southerners write about this–from Peterkin to Warren to Faulkner to Stockett–they seem to have a hard time putting their class and race privilege to the side, and you have some Black writers who have issues of class privilege as well when addressing these issues. Thus, the issue of literary noblesse oblige continues.
But I want to say again that the issue is not the subject matter; love between two people (whatever their race and/or class) is never politically incorrect. But even when those White charges of Black nannies were children, they had more power than the grown African Americans who were taking care of them. They could tell a lie that could get someone harmed or lynched. I’d like to see a story which acknowledges that unequal power differential, and which talks about the complexities and the complications of love in an unequal power differential. I am a Black professor–with power in the classroom. And I have two White female former students I couldn’t love more if they were my own children. Does it make it politically incorrect because I love them but I have more power than they do? No. What makes it politically incorrect is if I don’t acknowledge that I have more power. And what’s also politically incorrect is that nobody seems to care about the many Black southern writers who have written about this subject in the past and who can’t get people to buy the book in droves or get a movie deal for it, either.
August 8, 2011@ 4:18 PMAnn Boles says...
I’ve put off reading this book so far; now I may continue to do so.
August 8, 2011@ 3:53 PMLauren says...
Thank you, Ms. Southgate!! The novel is a fun little lark based on a preposterous premise, one white woman’s fantasy of what a civil rights story might look like. Beach chair romance, not literary fiction!!
August 8, 2011@ 3:00 PMKaty G. says...
I agree with Ms. Southgate. I had other problems with the novel, too. Still, I did enjoy it because it brought back sweet memories of my own babysitter/housekeeper, who I loved (at 5 years of age) nearly as much as my own mother. She was a steady and loving presence in my young life. Politically incorrect it may be today, but that was the reality in 1967.
August 8, 2011@ 2:04 PMThe Loopy Librarian says...
Wow! I hadn’t thought of it that way. I loved the book, but I can see what Southgate means. Indeed, the white people weren’t the heroes of the movement, and too many books, including The Help, portray them that way. Great commentary.
August 8, 2011@ 11:48 AM