If you have not seen the movie The Help, I strongly recommend seeing it. I went with a bunch of friends/co-workers to the theater last night and I didn't really know much about this movie, but Beth said I had to come because I had off on a Friday night and I needed to do something. Okay. So I went to see this movie, and it was one of the best movies I have seen in theaters in a looooong time.
It takes place in Mississippi during the 50s/60s, right before the Civil Rights Movement really got underway. It focuses on the relationships between wealthy white families and the black women they employ as maids. Well, 'maids' might be too soft of a term. They are treated like slaves, except that they get paid. One of the main characters, Eugenia 'Skeeter' Phelan, aspires to be a writer and is shocked to witness the way that her Junior League acquaintances treat (or rather, mistreat) their maids. She begins to talk with them, hear their stories, and they decide to compile these stories and experiences into a book. The problem is that relationships between blacks and white were encouraged to be unequal in that society, and collaboration between blacks and whites in order to effect social change was illegal. Writing this book, then, was illegal.
The movie pulls no punches in their honest portrayal of this era. I was shocked and appalled by some of things I saw. For instance...
1. Black maids were not allowed to use the house's bathrooms. They either had their own outhouses in the yard, or sometimes the family was wealthy enough to add a "colored bathroom" inside. Many whites were under the impression that using the same toilet as a colored person would infect them with diseases that colored people supposedly carried, and a maid who used the family's bathroom was threatened with dismissal.
2. The maids actually raise the white family's children. The main character, Skeeter, was raised by her maid. The white mothers either don't have the time or don't have the interest for raising their children, but having children is expected, so the raising and discipline of children was left to the maids. So how does that work, then? Hundreds of kids, multiple generations, are being raised by black women, yet the black women have no social or civil rights of any kind? 9 times out of 10, the maid who raised a child would go on to raise that child's children. Yet somewhere along the line, the respect the child had for the woman who raised him or her disappears and they begin to act exactly as their mothers did. The title of this post comes from a line spoken by one of the other main characters, Aibileen Clark. She says it to her 'white babies' in the hopes that they will grow up to believe in themselves, even without the love and interaction from their actual parents.
3. Who, then, raises the children of the maids? Sometimes, no one. The children would be left with the oldest sibling all day (if they were not old enough to be in school) and therefore the oldest had to stop going to school to either become a babysitter or a maid herself, once she was old enough. Sometimes, a grandmother or another black woman in the community who couldn't work as a maid anymore raised many black children, but it was very rare because women needed to work just as hard in order to make ends meet for their family.
4. Black people were treated as second-class citizens. This seems like an obvious statement, but we don't always see it as much today. The Help really fleshed it out for me: White families would talk about their maids or black people in general in a way that would be considered blatantly racist today, but was commonplace in that time. It was assumed that black people could not be trusted, and for this reason, many were fired or beaten for having done things that they did not do (stealing, mistreating, etc.). The bathroom thing. Jim Crow Laws. They were treated as if they were less than human.
I wish I could meet some of the black women that were portrayed in this movie and hear their stories firsthand. I have great admiration for these women and the strength they have because I never really knew about this time period of southern society. We learn about slavery in school for years on end, and after the Emancipation Proclamation, we jump right to the Civil Rights Movement. But what about the 100 years in between? The Help covers the last 10 or so years of that in-between slice of history and it really opened my eyes.
I absolutely loved this movie and I can't wait to see it again. If I were a history teacher, I would put this movie into my lesson plans. Please go see it. You will laugh, and you might cry, but you will not be disappointed.
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