Date: November 16, 2024
Author: Kathryn Stockett
Genre: historical fiction
I put in a good 300-page effort into this one. I watched and appreciated the movie prior to reading this and I know how this story has been portrayed as a must-read, but I’m not so sure.
My biggest problem with this story is that it was written by a white woman. I understand Mz. Stockett has expressed apologies for any incorrect account of how things really were for a colored person in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. It was not a nice place. And I was explained that had this story not been told by a white lady it may have never have had the platform it would require to be picked up by the masses.
Mz. Stockett did mention that she grew up in Jackson and had her own maid. That makes me feel like she is just like her character Skeeter using Aibileen’s tips on cleaning for her Miss Myrna column. Ironically Mz. Stockett writes this paragraph on page 128, ‘“I told her, let the regular old history books tell it. White people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time.”’
One other incident I couldn’t get past was the scene where Skeeter ‘accidentally’ forgets her satchel with all the colored maid’s accounts of stories about their trials and tribulations serving their white employers, along with a pamphlet of Jim Crow laws in a room full of her white friends. The employers. The dilemma as I see it: Skeeter knows how incredibly sensitive this material is and the brutality these maids would suffer if it got out they were telling stories about their white employers. They could be killed. Have their tongues cut out. Beaten. Any number of horrors. Sounds like a pretty important satchel. I know if I was in charge of it no matter how distracted or in a hurry I was, I’d never let it out of my sight. In fact, I wouldn’t have brought it in to begin with.
*Addendum: I felt guilty for not finishing the story. It’s so widely known, and I get the importance of the subject matter, so I trudged on.
*Spoiler alert* I got to ending minus twenty pages and Hilly figured out who one of the maids was. In one of the accounts Skeeter wrote she identified a very specific scratch in a very specific table. I wondered about this. Why not just install a big neon sign over the offending maid’s head? This was the point of no turning back. I gave this one better than my best college try.