The Help, by Kathryn Stockett (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009)
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, the struggles and dreams of that time find voice in Skeeter, white, 22-years-old, and clearly out of step with her community’s expectations; and the black maids, including the unforgettable Abileen and Minny, who Skeeter begs to tell their stories.
You’d never know it living here, in Jackson, Mississippi, be filled with two hundred thousand peoples. I see them numbers in the paper and I got to wonder, where do them peoples live? Underground? Cause I know just about everybody on my side a the bridge and plenty a white families too, and that sure don’t add up to no two hundred thousand.
Six days a week, I take the bus across the Woodrow Bilson Bridge to where Miss Leefolt and all her white friends live, in a neighborhood call Belhaven. Right next to Belhaven be the downtown and the state capital. Capitol building is real big, pretty on the outside but I never been in it. I wonder what they pay to clean that place.
Down the road from Belhaven is white Woodland Hills, then Sherwood Forest, which is miles a big live oaks with the moss hanging down. Nobody living in it yet, but it’s there for when the white folks is ready to move somewhere else new. Then it’s the country, out where Miss Skeeter live on the Longleaf cotton plantation. She don’t know it, but I picked cotton out there in 1931, during the depression, when we didn’t have nothing to eat but state cheese.
So Jackson’s just one white neighborhood after the next and more springing up down the road. But the colored part a town, we one big anthill, surrounded by state land that ain’t for sale. As our numbers get bigger, we can’t spread out. Our part a town just gets thicker. – from The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
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