The Help

Eugenia Skeeter Phelan returns to Jackson, Mississippi, from college in the early 1960s and, unlike her friends, starts noticing how completely the Black women who raise their children and run their households are erased from the story those families tell about themselves. She persuades a maid named Aibileen Clark, still grieving a son killed in a workplace accident because the white foreman would not call an ambulance for a Black man in time, to talk to her anonymously about what the work is actually like, and Aibileen's sharp tongued friend Minny Jackson, recently fired by a powerful local woman named Hilly Holbrook after a humiliating incident, joins soon after. As the civil rights movement presses closer to Jackson, more maids agree to be interviewed despite the real danger of losing their jobs or worse if they are identified, and Skeeter compiles the accounts into a book, published anonymously as Help, that becomes a local sensation and forces the white families of Jackson to recognize themselves in its unflattering portraits. The novel closes with the book's publication rippling through the town, Aibileen fired by her own employer in retaliation but freed, for the first time, to consider writing on her own account rather than typing up someone else's project.

Stockett alternates three narrators, Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, and lets the uncomfortable fact that a white writer profits from Black women's stories sit visibly inside the novel rather than resolving it neatly; some readers find that self awareness sufficient and others find it insufficient no matter how the book stages it. It reads easily and quickly for its length, warm and often funny in the domestic scenes even as the threat of real violence sits under nearly every chapter.