The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Summary


This novel is set in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Skeeter, a young wannabe journalist, has just graduated from college and moves back home where her family and friends insist that her finding a husband is all that matters. She becomes intrigued by the lives of black maids, partly due to the disappearance of the one who all but raised her. She begins to enlist the help of her friends’ maids to write a book about themselves from their perspective. Skeeter is forced to interview the maids in secret, although that still puts her and them in danger as blacks are beaten or murdered by white men for various insolences - and if they are caught - the same could happen to them. The maids cooperate (even though they are terrified to do so) as it is the first time they have had a voice in anything. The book describes how hard the maids worked and how frequently they existed in a life or death environment. Not only were their jobs to cook and clean, often the maids raised the white women’s children - oftentimes the white children loved their black nanny more than their own mother