Help

Me and rural towns have a little something in common, we both tend to live at least ten years behind the rest of the U.S. of A. - partly because it takes awhile for modernity to find our door and partly because we're awfully suspicious about what exactly the here-and-now wants to do to us. But somehow I managed to take a big step into the dangerous waters of the present a few weeks ago and I downloaded a book from itunes onto my iphone (the evil modern technology that my husband made me buy). I did this because listening to music while I was running just wasn't calming down the panic going on in my head while I ran. I needed something chunkier to shove out the I-want-to-stop thoughts that were thwacking me between my ears as I struggled along.

I chose to enter the world of running and reading with The Help. I hadn't a clue in Hades what it was about, I just knew that it was a hot, super-hot, book. And I figured I'd be a super-hip reader right away if it was in my itunes on my iphone.  If I was going to be modern I might as well go whole hog and leave Charles Dickens in the dust.

For those who haven't yet bought their kazoo to toot while the bandwagon goes rolling along, The Help is a book about a young Mississippi white woman in 1962 who decides to write a book from the perspective of the black maids (the help) who work in white homes taking care of white children. It was love at first word with this book...until I noticed a certain amount of discomfort that I felt when I'd go running by a couple of black ladies who walked at the same time that I ran every day. One of the women lives in a house a half mile from me. She is probably in her 80s. She pushes along a walker in front of her and scuffles down the street and up a steep hill every day while her caretaker, who must be about 60, walks along the road just past the hill waiting for and demanding that Ms. Walker-lady get up there. I couldn't deny to myself that they were around before Civil Rights was a phrase I could read about in my high school history books. But it wasn't because they'd maybe experienced what I was listening to that I felt bothered. I could feel that it was something else.

The more the white-woman character in The Help mentioned with disgust that Gone with the Wind was written from a white lady's perspective, the more I narrowed in on why I felt uncomfortable being friendly to these neighbors while black ladies with black accents were talking in my ears. I realized that I still didn't trust that the black ladies I was listening to were the real deal. What if this story I was listening to was just more insulting Vaudeville entertainment? I was afraid that the ladies I was passing might look at me with disgust if they knew that I was running to more white-conscience soothing trash. I was afraid that I still was gullibly sucking up another story that wasn't the truth. One day on a long run I decided that as soon as I got home I'd look up the author on the Internet, and if she was black, I wouldn't feel bad anymore.

She was white.

She was really while.

Like beautiful with blond hair white.

Darn.

The author did grow up in Mississippi. She was raised by a black maid. She had at least that much credible insight. But why did she keep harping on Gone with the Wind being written by a white lady when she was white? Why did she have her main character dare to write a book about present problems when she was writing about the problems of the south back in 1962? I was bothered. But I kept reading anyway.

I went on being bothered for days when I read an article in the New York Times about a black man who had been run over and killed by a group of white teenage boys in Jackson, Mississippi earlier this year. The boys had gone looking for some black person to harass that night - any black person. They got caught on tape taunting him, bullying him and finally killing him. It wasn't an article from the 1962 archives, it was an article from today.

I was shocked. It made me start remembering. I remembered that I have a good friend who grew up in Mississippi. She is just a couple of years older than me. She was the black prom queen at her high school. Not the prom queen, the black prom queen. Her school still had segregated proms until just four or five years ago. I also remembered a conversation I had with a black doctor I worked with when I lived in New York. He was from Jamaica but lived most of his life in New York City. He tried to tell me one night that nothing had really changed for black people since the Civil Rights movement. He tried to tell me that people were just as racist as they used to be, they just hid their feelings with more sophistication. He told me he had been pulled over in New Jersey just a couple of weeks before and that he knew it was racial profiling.

I tried arguing with him. I told him that although I knew we were decades or maybe centuries away from where we should be in race relations, we needed to acknowledge that some change was being made, that slow progress was happening. I wanted him to admit that a black doctor delivering a white baby was progress. But he didn't want to accept it or offer me what he thought would be a solution to the problem. I was frustrated with him then, but I don't know what to think now.

I can't say I haven't thoroughly enjoyed reading The Help. I think that making people self-reflect on how they approach racial, economic, religious and cultural relations is always good. And goodness knows I am most likely way over-thinking this, but I hope there is a black woman out there who will respond to The Help.  I hope to hear from a black woman novelist from Mississippi who will tell me how right or wrong this book is through a story of her own. That would help me even more.

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Yeah, this post needs some more rumination. I'm not quite sure it is right. I might try a do over in a little while. If you've read The Help what did it make you think?