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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.

Learning to See: Swimming Between Worlds

08 Monday Aug 2022

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Review: Swimming Between Worlds, by Elaine Neil Orr
Berkley, 2018. 382 pp. $16

Tacker Hart, former high school football star and would-be architect, has gone to Nigeria on a plum assignment for a private company, only to be summarily dismissed, practically kidnapped, and sent home to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The year is 1959, and momentous change is in the wind, though Tacker doesn’t sense it.

He senses little of anything, feeling adrift and angry and missing Nigeria, a place whose ways and atmosphere swallowed him whole. He’s barely put together that the Black society he admired in Africa would be forced to the back of the bus in his hometown. Moody and distraught, Tacker moves out of his parents’ house, persuades his father to let him manage one of two grocery stores Dad owns, and doesn’t know where he’s going, or why.

Two encounters give him purpose. First, he runs into Kate Morton, whom he remembers vaguely from high school, and picks up signals of common ground:

Still it seemed he was on vacation from the real point of living, a point he could only vaguely have described, though it had something to do with putting oneself at the edge of the world and staying there long enough to imagine something absolutely new. Outside, wind herded a curve of clouds at the far edge of sky and the air smelled of tobacco. The sidewalk was dark from the night’s rain and fall leaves lay sleeping on the pavement. Here and there morning light fell in dazzling sprees. Tacker felt the key in his pocket, cool and solid against his knuckles. He’d be happy to see Kate Monroe drop by again. She’d seemed as dazed by her present life as he felt about his.

Second, Tacker defends a Black customer, Gaines Townson, from a beating by several toughs in front of his store — Gaines has crossed an invisible line by shopping there. Subsequently, Tacker hires Gaines to work in the store, not realizing that his new employee has become active in the Civil Rights movement, participating in sit-ins at lunch counters. Nor does Tacker know that Kate, to whom he’s attracted more and more, distrusts the movement and Blacks in general.

Three protesters sit in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, Durham, North Carolina, February 1960 (courtesy North Carolina state archives, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Swimming Between Worlds stands out in several significant ways. Orr does a terrific job capturing how adulthood confuses the two prospective romantic partners. They’re both difficult, oversensitive, wary, aching from loneliness, and expert at driving people away. Kate, at least, has a more conventional excuse: Her mother, her sole surviving parent, has died, and Kate lives in her house, with its memories and societal burdens (her parents possessed status and therefore a code to live up to). As part of that legacy, the place contains letters her mother wanted her to burn. Big hint: Kate disobeys and is knocked for a loop.

Kate also has a suitor who’s doing his medical residency, and whom she’s not sure she wants to marry, yet doesn’t see what other choice in life she has. Marrying the doctor would give her social position and security but pigeonhole her as her husband’s reflection. I like how Orr portrays this dilemma while introducing Kate’s growing interest in photography, the pursuit that gives her something of her own, without overplaying it.

As you might surmise, the author shows you her characters’ flaws straight out. You lose patience with Tacker and Kate regularly, and nothing between them goes neatly. For instance, there’s a great scene when the medical resident shows up unexpectedly at a birthday party to which his rival has also been invited. Nor does the author protect her characters in other ways, for they suffer deep losses.

From a moral point of view, essential in a story like this, the sit-ins narrative doesn’t try too hard, just the right touch. Tacker’s no better than he should be, no liberal in hiding. It’s not immediately apparent to him how Blacks endure bigotry as second-class citizens, and how, if they seek ordinary pleasures he takes for granted — sitting down to eat at a lunch counter, for instance — they take their lives in their hands. Kate, too frightened even to contemplate what segregation means, argues with Tacker about it, though she comes around, eventually.

I’m less taken with Gaines’s portrayal. He seems one-dimensional, passionate about the cause and little else, as though he were merely a plot device. Indeed, he brings Tacker messages from the front lines and articles from Black newspapers, all of which prompt action. It’s also curious how easily Tacker, who has a quick temper that often gets him in trouble, tolerates Gaines’s jibes and lets him act as his conscience, his goad.

Then again, Tacker’s characterization in general sometimes feels stilted, particularly toward the beginning. The text often “explains” him, which strikes me as odd, given the care Orr takes with emotional resonance, as with her artful descriptions. Regarding the storytelling, though I like the Nigerian narrative in itself (and am reminded of my years in Africa), both the unnecessary prologue set there and one later section feel shoehorned in.

Still, Swimming Between Worlds is a thought-provoking novel, a human story full of feeling with an unexpected twist or two. It’s well worth your time.

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

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

the-gilded-years-9781501110450_lg

Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Weary of So Much: Driving the King

16 Thursday Apr 2015

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Review: Driving the King, by Ravi Howard

Harper, 2015. 325 pp. $26.

It’s November 1945, and Nat Weary, home from French and Belgian battlefields, wants nothing more than to marry his sweetheart and settle down to the life that World War II interrupted. He’s got a perfect proposal setup, too. Weary’s boyhood friend, the up-and-coming Nat King Cole, is in town to perform and has agreed to cue the big question from the stage. What could be more romantic?

But this is Montgomery, Alabama, where the unwritten law–the law that matters–says that African-Americans have no right to count on anything except humiliation and heartache. When a white man rushes the stage and attacks Cole with a lead pipe, Weary leaps to his friend’s defense, battering the assailant with a microphone. The white man gets three years; Weary gets ten. Once more, his life is interrupted, but this time, his fight against a racist enemy brings no reward except the belief he did the right thing. A decade and its promise have been stolen from him, simply because he’s black.

What I like the best about Driving the King–and there’s much to like–is that the narrative shows the moment-to-moment calculations, adjustments, and self-restraints an African-American must undertake to remain safe, which take such a drastic toll on the body and spirit. Safe is of course a relative term, because there are no guarantees or minimum standards. As the magnificent, harrowing prison scenes reveal, there’s always more to lose, unless you’re dead, which means there are always more games to play to keep life a hair’s-breadth more bearable.

Weary’s voice, as his name aptly suggests, is tired, measured, tamping down the fury only far enough so that it doesn’t cost him. A more passionate narrative would be hard to find. Yet Howard never lectures, rants, or explains, letting the story (and its images) do the work. What more fitting metaphor could describe the contest between Weary and the white thug–unequal in the eyes of the law–than a battered microphone? Weary, after all, has no voice that any power will listen to, and he may shout all he likes, but no one will ever hear. Likewise, when he recalls German wartime brutalities against his captured comrades, it’s plain that he’s also thinking about American racists.

 

The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.

 

From such a powerful start, Driving the King should go farther than it does. Most of the second half is entirely predictable, and though Weary’s struggles to cope with his losses earn all my empathy, the tension drains, and the ending feels anticlimactic. It doesn’t help that the narrative repeatedly (and annoyingly) jumps back and forth in time, for no particular purpose I can see except to delay the inevitable.

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

This is unfortunate, because the novel offers a worthy subplot, the Montgomery bus boycott that takes place after Weary’s released from prison. The boycott involves many, many courageous people, of whom Rosa Parks was neither the first nor the last. Weary’s relatives take an active part; a young Martin Luther King makes a cameo appearance; and Almena Lomax, who ran an African-American newspaper in Los Angeles, figures heavily in the story.

But where’s Weary himself? Working for Nat Cole in LA, which leaves him on the sidelines. There’s a lot about bringing Cole back to Montgomery for a gig, but though the two men treat that as unfinished business, it feels small next to everything else. I don’t know whether Howard felt hampered by the historical record or thought his narrative delivered fully on its promise, but I wish he’d chosen otherwise.

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