Tag Archives: Mississippi

Trouble Amid the Magnolias: The Help

31 Monday Oct 2022

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Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Putnam, 2009. 444 pp. $17

Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, recent 1962 graduate of the University of Mississippi and daughter of a well-to-do cotton planter, feels uncomfortable back home in Jackson. Unlike other young women in her social class, she doesn’t even pretend to like football or the young men who love it.

Skeeter (short for “mosquito,” a childhood nickname inflicted by her empty-headed older brother) has never even had a date, doesn’t know how to chat up a prospective mate, and more or less resists her mother’s attempts to make her over and see her married. Rather, she wants to be a journalist and write important stories.

Skeeter wishes she could talk to Constantine, the Black maid who raised her and would surely understand her dreams, unusual though they are. But Constantine has left the Phelan household under circumstances no one will reveal.

Federal marshals escort James Meredith to class at the University of Mississippi, October 1962 (courtesy U.S. News & World Report and the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, two other Black women serve Skeeter’s erstwhile high school friends—or, rather, one does, because the other’s fired for unjust cause. Minny’s a fabulous cook, but she speaks her mind, and white employers don’t like that, or even the suggestion that she has a mind to speak. Her friend Aibileen moves heaven and earth to find her another job, which occasions the telling of lies.

Further, Aibileen, who loves the white children she brings up—seventeen, altogether, over her years of service—is grief-stricken and angry. Her beloved son, a college graduate, was beaten to death because he inadvertently used a bathroom reserved for whites—and his employer looked the other way. Consequently, Minny and Aibileen, though well schooled on how to cope in the white world, are tired of taking blows.

You know that Skeeter’s path will somehow intertwine with those of Minny and Aibileen, improbable though that sounds on the surface. You also know that Skeeter must make the approach, because she’s the only one who can do so and live to tell about it. Without giving anything away, I’ll simply say that the consequences are farther-reaching than she could have imagined, and that the racial animosity that pervades every social interaction in Jackson comes into full focus.

This setup takes a while to come together, and the narrative sometimes feels top-heavy, with three narrators, their secrets, home lives, and social connections, not all of which fit seamlessly. But Stockett keeps the pot boiling throughout, and her story, if it seems implausible at odd moments, packs a punch.

I like how she re-creates the 1960s, rare authenticity for an author who didn’t live through that time. But she grasps the Sixties vibe, the notion that change is in the air, like it or not—and these characters don’t, for the most part. Stockett senses what’s worth including and what isn’t, and I never think she drags in details, which convey a coherent worldview, the ultimate test of historical fiction and arguably its most important component. Faithful to that mindset, she makes Skeeter, though relatively enlightened by comparison to her peers, no better than she should be.

All three principal characters appeal, if in different ways and voices. Minny, the saltiest, steals the show, as with this trenchant commentary about her new employer, Celia:

. . . Miss Celia stares out the back window at the colored man raking up the leaves. She’s got so many azalea bushes, her yard’s going to look like Gone With the Wind come spring. I don’t like azaleas and I sure didn’t like that movie, the way they made slavery look like a big happy tea party. If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green drapes up her little white pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress.

Too bad the minor characters don’t measure up. Skeeter’s former high school friends, now the faceless villains running the Junior League, seem like devices to aid the convoluted plot. A potential suitor of Skeeter’s hardly registers a pulse, so I don’t understand why she looks twice at him.

Her father and brother are placeholders, though her mother, who at first comes across as a stereotypical steel magnolia, achieves a little depth as the story progresses. More would have helped. I wonder whether the busyness of the narrative gets in the way; there’s just not enough time and space for development.

But The Help is a courageous, powerful novel, the kind that might not get published today, I fear. With our present emphasis on authors telling only those stories that belong to them, as judged by unknown but omnipotent arbiters, we’ve surrendered to appearances, as though they mattered more than truth. But you can still read this novel, which surrenders to nothing, and I recommend that you do.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Flood, a Bootlegger, and Two Orphans: The Tilted World

08 Thursday Oct 2015

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Review: The Tilted World, by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Morrow, 2013. 303 pp. $26

This improbable, larger-than-life tale of abandonment and redemptive love makes entertaining reading, but I wonder whether the feel-good got in the way–unless, of course, you think it needs no justification. That larger question belongs in a future post, but for now, let’s consider The Tilted World on its own, fairly considerable merits.

Start with the premise, which has two federal agents casing Hobnob Landing, a fictional Mississippi town, in spring 1927. The region has suffered biblical rainstorms, and the mighty river has risen, threatening to break the levees and bring disaster. But the two agents, Ham Johnson and Teddy Ingersoll, aren’t there to help tame the tide, though they pitch in heroically. Rather, reporting to Herbert Hoover, ambitious secretary of commerce who wants the Republican nomination in 1928, Ham and Ingersoll are to: investigate the murders of two Prohibition agents; solve the case; and keep the news from a hungry press eager to discredit the government. Nothing to it, right?

Natural Steps, Arkansas, during the Mississippi flood of 1927 (Courtesy Wikipedia).

Natural Steps, Arkansas, during the Mississippi flood of 1927 (Courtesy Wikipedia).

But no sooner do they arrive in Hobnob Landing than they happen on the bodies from a random, everyday shootout, the only survivor of which is a crying infant. Ingersoll takes the orphan’s care upon himself. He gives the boy to Dixie Clay Hollister, a woman who happens to be mourning her only child. Dixie Clay also happens to be a bootlegger, which the good-hearted Ingersoll doesn’t know. Nor can he guess that her husband, Jesse, walks that Mississippi Valley of death fearing no evil because he’s the meanest sonofabitch in it and the probable killer of the two Prohibition men.

Dixie Clay is bereft of love and destined to remain so, she supposes, because she let Jesse’s charm blind her to his now-obvious flaws. Ingersoll, an adept who can shoot straighter than anybody, set a broken limb, and (in a hilarious scene) make a one-string blues guitar from the wire around a broom neck, has never turned his resourcefulness to find time to become emotionally attached. Bootlegger and federal agent, a match made in heaven, and it’s an orphan who brings them together–fittingly so, because Ingersoll grew up in an orphanage.

I like the irony in this novel. Dixie Clay makes a quality product to scrupulous standards, for which she demands top dollar; no bathtub gin for her. The joyful love she lavishes on Willy, the infant, feels real and touching, and she generously gives people the benefit of the doubt. A good person, in other words, who made the mistake of marrying a scoundrel. Meanwhile, there’s rampant bribery, whoring, and racism running through Hobnob Landing, none of which anybody objects to. But the law has made Dixie Clay a criminal, and Ingersoll, who sees her need and understands her context, will have to arrest her to fulfill his office.

Consequently, the tension in The Tilted World comes mostly from whether evil deeds go unpunished while good ones bring catastrophe, and the authors delay the definitive answer with skill. However, it’s pretty clear from the get-go what’s meant to happen, and various scenes of dire circumstances stray perilously close to cliché, if not going over the line. Call me unromantic, but I think a woman with a freshly broken arm and cracked ribs would tell her lover, “Not tonight, dear.” But maybe we should all inhabit a novel someday.

Ingersoll seems altogether too nurturing and sensitive to have never made a friend besides Ham, whereas Dixie Clay is rather erudite for someone who’s had practically no formal learning. Remarkably, neither reveals an ounce of prejudice about anyone. Jesse starts out as a believable villain but slides into over-the-top stereotype. In his single but crucial scene, Herbert C. Hoover sounds more like J. Edgar Hoover (and I doubt that the secretary of commerce would have been chasing the nomination four months before Coolidge renounced it). The flashbacks to World War I, in which Ham and Ingersoll served together, offer much extraneous detail and a few inaccuracies; here, the authors’ love of period detail gets them into trouble.

On the plus side, there’s the prose. I loved this passage, in which Dixie Clay frees a hummingbird that has stuck its “needle nose” in a screen door, and whose “wings in their blurry panic” remind her of the outboard motor on Jesse’s boat.

Dixie Clay opened her palm, but the hummer didn’t fly away, just sat, stunned, its heartbeat rapid. . . . The hummer’s grommet had three or four scarlet flecks, and so she knew it was a young male, just easing into its ruby muffler, one feather at a time. Like Willy’s eyes, which she’d studied earlier that day, in the process of turning from blue-gray to brown, not by darkening overall but dot by chocolate dot.
I’ll show you hummingbirds, Willy. I’ll show you every wondrous thing.

There are wondrous things in The Tilted World, along with the excesses. Take all of that for what you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Can a Powerful Premise Be Enough: The Secret of Magic

12 Thursday Feb 2015

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Review: The Secret of Magic, by Deborah Johnson

Putnam, 2014. 402 pp. $27

Like millions of other American servicemen in October 1945, Joe Howard Wilson is going home, having fought the good fight. But Joe Howard is African-American, which means he rides the back of the bus through Alabama to Mississippi. The lieutenant’s bars on his uniform collar and his Distinguished Service Cross should command respect, but they don’t–not from white onlookers, anyway–who throw him deadly stares. Sure enough, when Lt. Wilson refuses to leave the bus to make room for German prisoners-of-war, his objection costs him his life. A grand jury, meeting for fifteen minutes, calls his death accidental.

What a stirring start, a window on a vile, painful chapter in our nation’s history. I’ve read about violence against African-American veterans after both world wars, so I was eager to see what Deborah Johnson made of Joe Howard Wilson’s fictional case. Unfortunately, the answer is, Not much.

Regina Mary Robichard, a newly minted graduate of Columbia University Law School, works for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s office in New York. Against his better judgment, he lets Regina go to Revere, Mississippi, to find evidence to pursue the case, following the request of one M. P. Calhoun, a member of the Revere white aristocracy. Regina singles out this case from the hundreds gathering in her office because her father was lynched by an Omaha mob; and the photo Calhoun sends of the late Joe Howard and his father, which radiates love and warmth, reminds Regina painfully of the parent she never knew.

An African-American enters a Mississippi movie theater from the back entrance, 1939. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

An African-American enters a Mississippi movie theater from the back entrance, 1939. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

This is very powerful stuff, and Johnson takes pains to make its context particular, re-creating the fictional postwar Revere with care. Nothing is as simple as it seems in this town of old families and older prejudices, of conflicting alliances, patronage, and barely repressed anger that needs little coaxing to erupt into violence. The confrontations between Regina and the white citizenry, my favorite scenes, often crackle with fiery subtext that reveals vast gradations of insult and blindness. The Confederate flag flying at the courthouse is only the most concrete symbol, mocking the men like Joe Howard who fought for ideals of justice that somehow don’t apply to them.

However, The Secret of Magic fails to develop these themes to serve or sustain the story. For me, the problem begins with Regina, who really doesn’t belong in the book. I don’t believe for one minute that she’s a lawyer–it takes her three hundred pages to act like one–or from New York, which feels like an address rather than her home or the place that has shaped and educated her.

There’s also no way that Thurgood Marshall would have allowed the clueless, wide-eyed Regina within a thousand miles of Mississippi, a setup, if ever there was one. The subplot involving New York office politics feels like a clumsy attempt to raise the tension, and Marshall has little or no purpose here. The thirty pages during which Regina and he tell each other what they both know stops the narrative cold, and the important bits reappear more effectively through action anyway, the moment she arrives in Revere.

The storytelling falls short in other ways too. Several scenes take place in total darkness, yet, somehow, Regina manages to see remarkably well. Characters promise to reveal their secrets in due time, only to say nothing momentous when that time comes. Repeatedly, the author tells the reader what the characters have just shown.

As for the legal case, there isn’t one. Regina manages to interview a murder witness whom the grand jury failed to question, but that doesn’t matter. Everybody in town knows who killed Joe Howard–the reader can guess too, pretty soon–and no indictment will be filed. So why does the novel require an outsider as a catalyst? Without one, the story would have worked more smoothly and plausibly, with greater tension.

The answer is that Regina’s favorite book growing up was called The Secret of Magic by M. P. Calhoun. The M. P. stands for Mary Pickett (as if Calhoun weren’t enough of a Confederate moniker), whose book was banned in the South for portraying an interracial friendship. Fair enough, so far as Mary Pickett’s character is concerned, though it’s unnecessary; the story fleshes her out in other ways. More to the point, Regina’s fascination with a real, live author feels trivial and star-struck, and the frequent quotations from Mary Pickett’s book only slow down the narrative.

I think that to drag in this literary conceit and honor Thurgood Marshall, Johnson had to twist her story in ways she shouldn’t have. That’s too bad, because she had a fine starting point.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.