What kind of help?

Reading documents from and a bit of an introduction to the New Left, specifically about Freedom Summer, raised questions for me about the helping relationships between white and black Americans.  One objection to the novel, The Help, has been that it suggests that the maids (aka the hired domestic help) needed the help of the young, white woman to gain their agency and ability to tell their stories.  Should we distinguish between their ability to know and articulate their experience and their access to the means to publicize those stories?  Would that be parallel to the strategic help young, white volunteers gave to voter registration campaigns by bringing the work to media attention? 

The Dream of a Common Language

Yesterday in class I made a plea:  If there is no possibility that imagination can bring us into communication with each other, if we cannot ever get inside each others' minds and hearts, then there is no hope for human community and we will all be captive within our boundaries.  I said something like that.  I was speaking specifically about the dual question for fiction writers (and implicitly for their readers): is it allowable for an author to write in the voice of characters whose identity and experience is vastly different than the author's?  And, is it possible to do that adequately, with authority and truth?

I did not invoke Adrienne Rich's evocative phrase, used as the title of a collection of her poems, "The Dream of a Common Language."  I wish that I had because the phrase is rich in hope (even as Rich was well aware of the obstacles) and also because she died this week.  Here is a fine tribute in the New York Times.

Poetry Magazine link to poems, essays, bio, etc.

Access to 1963 and 64 in Jackson MI

A Critical Reveiw of the novel The Help

This is a very comprehensive response that uses critical in both the neutral and the negative sense.  Among its interesting features are links to newspapers from Jackson MI in the time period of the novel.

Lines in The Help

"She just don't see em.  The lines.  Not between her and me, not between her and Hilly."  This Minny says to Abilene about Celia.  p. 367 in my edition. 

After spending much of Monday in a workshop with several Norwegian scholars and thinking about the comparisons between Norwegian and American culture, this observation took on added weight.  While Americans are eager to affirm the openness of our society and to defend the possibility of individuals advancing their positions toward social equality, this comment by a fictional character shines a bright light on the possibility that opportunity is more a matter of positional change and less of  structural change.

Now I must make reference to my religion department course on Christianity in India.  In that course we must repeatedly confront the "vexing" topic of caste.  And we find that again and again reform movements that initially call into question the very premise of caste distinction (that is calling for structural change) end up settling for  advancing the position of their group within the system (that is accepting positional change.)  Lines continue to be drawn, but 'my group' has made progress within them. 

One of the participants in the recent workshop observed that in much of European socialism the goal is to make all people equal while in the USA the goal is to give everyone an equal opportunity to make something of themselves.  This American view seems to assume that those racial and class lines are natural.  I'm interested in thinking about how the characters in this book think about those lines.

This comment by Minny suggests that Celia is unaware of the lines.  She wants to be friends both with Hilly who is her social superior and with Minny who is her servant and black.  She does not understand that class and race mitigate against such relationships.  In contrast Skeeter who is Hilly's social equal arranges for all those toilets to be left on Hilly's lawn and collaborates with Minny and other maids.  Does she do this on purpose?  Is she aware that she is calling the whole structure into question?  The novel is not definitive.

There is no doubt that Hilly no longer regards Skeeter as her equal or as her friend.  How Minny and the other maids regard Skeeter is more difficult to say.  There is still a line between them.  They may not have become friends.  But perhaps they have come to see each other more fully.  But maybe not.  I am left wondering if Abilene, Minny, and all those people from the church who sign the book for Skeeter still regard her in the the categories available to employees and employers in the Jim Crow south. Is that why they urge her to move to New York as they might have given advise to a small, white child?

Water brings . . .

When friends came back from a sabbatical trip to Tanzania, they pledged that once a week they would wash themselves with a bucket of water rather than taking a shower; the practice was intended to remind them of how precious water was in the village where they stayed and thus also to remind them of the people with whom they lived and worked.

Surely it is the case that here in the upper-midwest we seldom notice how precious and necessary water is because we are never far from a lake or a river and our faucets bring hot and cold running water almost without fail.  Once in a great while something in the well-pump system at our house fails.  Usually this happens when I am the shower and covered with soap.  It is not a happy situation; rather one that gets my day off to a bad start.

In contrast, this morning filling my teakettle from a shiny, new, kitchen faucet started the day well.  Using it put a smile on my face.  The pleasure of the tool reminded me to be grateful for the simple, but necessary resource--water, for the privilege of easy access to that water, and for my husband who installed the faucet that gave me access so easily.