The Help: Race, religion and sin in the South

One thing I learned from reading The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s novel about African American women maids and their white women employers in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, it that it is almost impossible to tell a completely honest story about a deeply dishonest society. But I’m glad Stockett wrote this book and I read it. I plan to see the film. You just have to keep seeing, and saying, and adding to the accumulations of perspectives on racism in America so that eventually there may be enough truth for enough people to see.

The southern white women employers in The Help don’t want to see the way the inequality of their racist social compact impacts the lives of their African American maids. That would make trouble in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, a time when troubling racial relations in the U.S. were already underway. These white women want to keep their racial privilege, and so they will themselves to be ignorant. This is the sin of “willful ignorance,” the kind of sin where you purposefully wish “to be ignorant of certain things” so you can “sin the more freely.” That is the way these white women employers manage their existence within their racist society, and it is deeply corrupting.

What happens when you break that rigid compact on race, when you refuse to be “willfully ignorant”? This is what The Help seeks to convey, both the cost of willing yourself not to see the African American women who work in these intimate family settings, themselves pretending not to see what they see, and hear what they hear, and the risks (and rewards) of starting to see and to tell and to do what’s right.

The plot of The Help is that one young white woman, nicknamed “Skeeter” for her tall, skinny “unfeminine” frame, breaks this code of racial willed unseeing. Frustrated herself by having a college degree and yet trapped in expectations of the marriage and children route for white women of her time, she decides she wants to write about the lives of African American women maids in her hometown. She enlists the collaboration of two African American women maids, Aibileen, who is mourning the recent death of her son, and Minny, a wonderful cook who also keeps getting fired for speaking her mind.

The sinful condition of willful ignorance on race in the United States creates a kind of liar society where not seeing and not saying are the norm. Aibileen observes, in having a non-conversation with her white woman employer, “I ain’t saying it. And I know she ain’t saying what she want a say either and it’s a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.” When Skeeter pitches her the idea to an editor in New York that she will write the stories of the African American maids experiences, the editor is skeptical. “What maid in her right mind would ever tell you the truth?”

There are white women in the novel who willing to do almost anything to keep racism in place; Hilly, a self-styled southern white lady, is one. Hilly “hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt” observes Skeeter.

But the lure of being able to finally say what’s true, and write what’s true, and live what’s true is too tempting. Minny thinks about what’s she’s kept bottled up inside so long. “’We don’t want a bring all that mess up.’ Aibileen wipes her nose with a hankie. ‘Tell people the truth.’ ‘No, we don’t,’ I say, but I stop. It’s something about that word truth. I’ve been trying to tell white women the truth about working for them since I was fourteen years old…Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life. I say inside my head again, just for that feeling.”

Skeeter discovers the “undisguised hate” for white women among African American women maids, and the “inexplicable love.” How can you not feel some human connection, even in an inhuman situation? And it tears people apart, though the heaviest burden falls on the African American women who try to protect their lives and their privacy.

They tell their truths, and the stories get published. All three women pay a price.

Overcoming “willful ignorance” is not an easy task.

Racism in America is a deeply theological issue for me precisely for that reason. It is our “original sin,” the snake in the garden of our commitment to freedom and equality. And we make it so much worse by continuing to will our ignorance of the continuing legacy of racism in our divided national consciousness. This is particularly painful for me when the topic is both race and gender equality.

As I have written in Sex, Race and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White, white liberal women like myself are hard-pressed to really see the differences these histories of racism have made in the lives of African American women. We try to paper over the differences, and “bond” through gender, trying to ignore the class and race differences that exist today that structure our lives with such enormous consequences. It doesn’t really work. We’re “nice,” and yet nothing changes. Making real change is controversial.

Is that the source of the controversy generated by the book, The Help, and now the film? Not really. The controversy seems to focus mostly on the differences in dialogue. Is that what is really so controversial about this book that tries to lay out some of the painful truths of the deep complicity of white women in racism in their own homes, while also risking one of the besetting sins of white people, namely voyeurism of African American life?

So I think these kinds of controversies about “dialogue” are generated still because people would prefer to be willfully ignorant about how racism actually functions in our society, not just in 1962, but today. Let’s talk about the dialect so we don’t have to talk about the pain about which we can do basically nothing until we all tell the truth and act on the truth.

Muriel Rukeyser asks us to consider, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

Amen and amen.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  | Aug 12, 2011 3:01 PM