Southern Cultures: The Help Special Issue: Volume 20: Number 1 – Spring 2014 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

Southern Cultures: The Help Special Issue
Volume 20: Number 1 – Spring 2014

Table of Contents

Front Porch,
by Harry L. Watson
"Lauded for her endless gifts and selfless generosity, Mammy is summoned from the kitchen to refute the critics of southern race relations; cruelly circumscribed and taken for granted, she silently confirms them all."

The Divided Reception of The Help
by Suzanne W. Jones
The more one examines the reception of The Help, the less one is able to categorize the reception as divided between blacks and whites or academics and general readers or those who have worked as domestics and those who haven't.

Black Women's Memories and The Help
by Valerie Smith
"Cultural products—literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc.—that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and transcended its racial past."

"A Stake in the Story": Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby, and the Politics of Southern Storytelling
by Susan V. Donaldson
"Like The Help, Can't Quit You, Baby focuses on the layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee, but in ways that are far more unsettling."

"We Ain't Doin' Civil Rights": The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help
by Allison Graham
"Perhaps because the modern Civil Rights Movement and television news came of age together, the younger medium was destined to become an iconographic feature of the civil rights genre."

Every Child Left Behind: Minny's Many Invisible Children in The Help
by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders
"The question arises: wouldn't the mammy characters be rendered more believable in their altruism if it extended beyond white children to all children?"

Kathryn Stockett's Postmodern First Novel
by Pearl McHaney
"Pleasure and anger are dependent on one another for heightened authenticity. Discussing The Help with delight and outrage seems just the right action."

Not Forgotten: Twenty-Five Years Out from Telling Memories
Conversations Between Mary Yelling and Susan Tucker
compiled and introduced by Susan Tucker
"I am glad she used what the women told us and made something different from it. She made people listen. I know it is fiction, and I know not everyone liked it, but she made people not forget. What more can you want?"

Mason-Dixon Lines
Prayer for My Children
poetry by Kate Daniels

About the Contributors

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Feb 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469615936

Book preview

front porch

As Kimberly Wallace-Sanders discusses in her essay, many African American women during the Jim Crow era had to spend more time raising white children than their own. Studio portrait of seated African American woman and young girl, Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Mss. 3778, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries.

Mammy is one of the most vivid characters on the southern cultural landscape. Immortalized in songs, stories, and films, Mammy is the endlessly loving, eternally loyal black woman who nurses, scolds, comforts, and guides her white charges from the cradle to adulthood and beyond, dependable in every emergency from colic to a failed romance. In one famous incarnation, she is Scarlett O’Hara’s indispensable emotional anchor; in another, she is William Faulkner’s Dilsey, whose steadfast moral plumb line marks the Compson family’s inexorable decline. Ageless, sexless, and undistracted by her own children, she pours endless love on her white babies, teaches them (and their mothers) everything important from manners to biscuit-making, and upholds family standards even when her white folks are tempted to crumple. She’s like a member of the family, they assure all comers, echoing the planters’ faded evocation of our family, black and white. Lauded for her endless gifts and selfless generosity, she is summoned from the kitchen to refute the critics of southern race relations; cruelly circumscribed and taken for granted, she silently confirms them all. In an age of unstable families and revolutionized race relations, it’s no wonder that Mammy is controversial.

In 2009, white Mississippi author Kathryn Stockett offered a new perspective on Mammy in her debut novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, The Help tells the story of Skeeter Phelan, an ambitious young white woman who tries to launch her writing career with a household column for the local paper. Knowing nothing of housekeeping, she persuades her friend’s longsuffering maid Aibileen to share her knowledge. Their clandestine relationship opens Skeeter’s eyes to the rank injustices of a maid’s life and Jackson’s racial order, which is coming apart even as the story progresses, despite the best efforts of the city’s leaders and their wives to hold the line in public and in their private households. Skeeter’s dawning (but always incomplete) insight gives her the idea for a book of stories from Jackson maids, anonymously telling the sad, bitter details of exploitation and meanness from their employers. Parallel chapters told by Aibileen and her friend Minny explain how they preserve their own dignity by pushing back, one by writing and prayer, the other by open confrontation. Of the two maids, Aibileen more closely matches Mammy’s classic profile, as she lavishes love on her last and latest white baby, Mae Mobley, but makes her own sacrifice a form of resistance by using steady affirmation and encouragement to protect Mae Mobley from her weak mother and a sexist society. In the end, the community of Jackson maids gain the satisfaction of seeing their stories told in public, collectively shaming their tyrannical employers, and Skeeter rides the book’s success to a promising New York career. Should the reader be troubled by these unequal outcomes? The text does not say.

The Help has been wildly successful, selling over 5 million copies in 35 countries, spending over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and inspiring an equally popular movie with four Academy Award nominations and an Oscar win by Octavia Spencer for her portrayal of Minny. White readers and viewers have been especially enthusiastic, praising The Help for helping them see the suffering and abuse that the Mammy stereotype conceals. Some black readers and viewers have been equally complimentary, but black and white critics have also condemned Stockett’s work, claiming that she soft-pedaled the pain in a set of stories she had no right to tell, glorified the white liberal Skeeter at the expense of black victims, ignored sexual abuse, distorted black speech with demeaning dialect, ignored institutional racism, and minimized the public Civil Rights Movement in favor of the struggle in private homes. The Association of Black Women Historians was particularly critical, and issued an open statement that condemned The Help for reinforcing and perpetuating the very stereotypes other readers believed it had exposed. [See their statement in the sidebar on page 32.]

Mammy is one of the most vivid characters on the cultural landscape, immortalized in song, story, film, advertising, and even architecture. In this special issue, we look beyond the myths and explore the complexity of real women’s lives. Mammy’s Cupboard Restaurant, Natchez, Mississippi, October 10, 2008, by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

This issue of Southern Cultures probes reactions to this landmark book and movie. It began as a series of conference papers assembled by author Suzanne Jones in March 2011 at Vanderbilt University. Audience reaction was so lively that Jones and her colleagues agreed to publish the papers together, and Southern Cultures is grateful to all of them for sharing their provocative thoughts.

Jones opens the discussion by surveying popular and critical reactions to The Help. Listing its many honors and accolades, she observes that "readership and viewership of The Help may someday surpass that of Gone With the Wind." While some critics assumed that reactions to The Help would split cleanly on racial lines, Jones’s study of blogs and websites found numerous whites who dismissed it and many blacks who praised it, like one commenter who declared firmly, I’m a Black woman and I enjoyed this movie . . . I wanted more. Contrasting the diverging expectations of popular readers and progressive critics, Jones quotes one observer who questions whether any work could ever appeal to both groups, before probing further and finding that academic critics were no more unanimous about the book than racial blocs in the general public. She concludes with complex examples of readers who liked The Help while disagreeing with it, and concludes that their responses reveal as much about U.S. race relations in the early twenty-first century as about the complex literary transactions between individual readers and viewers.

After this broad overview of reader responses, Valerie Smith addresses The Help’s place among other books and films on the Civil Rights Movement. Like many other commentators, she places the movie version among a cluster of films that pander to white sensibilities by making enlightened whites like Skeeter the heroes of the black freedom struggle. At the same time, she sees signs that Stockett worries about the same problem by calling attention to earlier and unsuccessful white efforts to tell a black story. Nor does she hide her admiration for the character Aibileen and Viola Davis’s screen portrayal of her, and praises the book and movie for being as much about Aibileen’s quiet heroism as Skeeter’s public transformation.

Susan Donaldson has no such ambivalence. While Jones thinks that Stockett struggles over her right to tell the maids’ story, Donaldson finds Stockett . . . all but oblivious to the long sad history of narrative theft of black stories by white writers. She compares The Help to a superficially similar novel, Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby, and praises its self-reflective, self-critical point of view over what she sees as Stockett’s smug fable of black endurance and white redemption. In the face of Stockett’s simplistic optimism, Donaldson praises Douglas’s disturbing and unsettling novel, with its post-modern sensibility and uncomfortable conclusion that offers no redemption but only the sense of an ending, of old narratives of white ladies and their ‘help’ now rendered untenable, unsustainable. Here Donaldson may be offering a perfect example of the gulf Jones sees between the expectations of popular and academic readers, for as of this writing, five years after publication, The Help occupies the 2,015th place on Amazon’s bestseller list, while Can’t Quit You, Baby languishes at 209,961.

Our other authors have equally diverse reactions. Allison Graham dissects The Help’s adherence to the generic conventions of the civil rights movie, citing its focus on Skeeter as white redeemer, its use of TV news—instead of black voices and experiences—for validation, and its use of female socialites as its racist villains in place of the men who maintain and finance segregation. Why, she asks, does Hollywood present the Civil Rights Movement as a relatively harmless domestic drama starring white women, instead of a public and political confrontation that highlights institutional racism, Emmett Till, Stokely Carmichael, Freedom Summer, and Booker Wright, the Jackson waiter whose on-air j’accuse of white customers brought him violent retribution and economic ruin in 1966? Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is equally critical, scoring the novel for ignoring the maids’ own children and censuring Aibileen’s and Minny’s chapters for reflect[ing] little of their own inner lives as black women or working women. Unlike Smith, who praised Stockett’s portrait of Aibileen, Wallace-Sanders sees nothing in the maids’ sections but a vehicle for the author to experiment with barely updated southern plantation dialect. Adding to the swirl of contrasting views, Pearl McHaney praises Kathryn Stockett’s First Postmodern Novel, the very quality which Susan Donaldson says it lacks, and calls it a flawed, but courageous, first novel. Like Donaldson, she compares it to Can’t Quit You, Baby, but also to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, before reflecting that a combination of such books could do exactly what literature should: initiate conversations, debates, and searches for historical facts, more books to read, and other films to see.

Allison Graham dissects The Help’s adherence to the generic conventions of the civil rights movie, citing its use of TV news—instead of black voices and experiences—for validation. Jackson State student and MFDP newspaper editor Ralph Wheeler filming during a demonstration for welfare rights in Jackson, Mississippi, ca. 1965, courtesy of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, Susan Tucker and Mary Yelling collaborated in the research that led to Telling Memories Among Southern Women, the first of what is now a small shelf of books recounting the memories of black domestics and their white employers. Kathryn Stockett followed dozens of other writers and would-be writers in consulting with Tucker as she prepared to write The Help. In the Not Forgotten feature of this issue, Tucker and Yelling reflect together on their own memories of black workers and white families, on the experience of collecting the stories in Telling Memories, and on the challenges of persuading their informants to make their words public. Yelling offers her own reflection on Stockett’s daring—some would say presumptuous—effort to retell the stories of women very different from herself: I know it is fiction, and I know not everyone liked it, but she made people not forget. What more can you want?

The Help reminds us that families are not only havens in a heartless world, but also sites of cruelty and suffering. Kate Daniels does not address the complex triad of mothers, servants, and children in her closing poem, Prayer for my Children, but evokes the guilt of mothers who remember their moments of human weakness. Without invoking Mammy, her lines still convey something of the domestic pain that The Help recalls, however inadequately, as white families reflect on their own failures and blacks respect the sacrifices that others made before them.

I’ll close with a story about my Aunt Elizabeth, a postwar professor of home economics who trained home demonstration agents in South Carolina. A polar opposite of Mammy, Elizabeth’s sunny disposition did not impede her professional dedication to documenting all the mysteries of a well-run southern household. Such things do not always appear in books so like a cross between Skeeter and Celia, The