For a kind of catharsis I've written a synthesis of the reflections of my Southern friends and me. I've even given it a title, like a school report--and some of it is a report on school--back in South Carolina in the 1960s
(This is an extension of an earlier blog!)
Help for The Help
During a manipulatively cruel moment of the movie "The Help," the person I was with whispered, "How could they do that?" I don't usually talk in movies, but I hissed back, "They couldn't! They wouldn't! They didn’t! This is totally false. The movie makers should be ashamed of themselves."
I can just imagine the pre-shooting dialogue at the Manipulating-the-Audience meeting.
“What formula should we use to make everyone cry at the injustice of it all?
“How about the one where the sweet old family servant gets thrown out to impress the DAR?”
“That’s good!”
“How about the one where the white woman refuses to let in the daughter her servant almost never gets to see (because of her lifetime job of taking care of a white child)?”
“That’s good too! Let’s use both!
I was entertained by "The Help" but offended by the caricatures of the white Southern women. I grew up in the South in the 1960s, and I know that there were racists and racist policies, but creating such caricatures is both insulting and dangerous. It's insulting because it implies that we movie-goers are so insensitive that we have to be brain damaged by caricatures wielding sledgehammers before we can feel the pain. It's dangerous because it gives the impression that racists are villainous and easy to spot. Racism, like so many other societal problems, is much more subtle and insidious.
But at least seeing this movie has motivated me to contact Southern friends, with whom I’ve shared recollections of the period. Their accounts are so much more complex, intelligent, and genuine than the movie is.
I first contacted Sara, AKA My Best Friend in Fifth Grade. We’d already had an e-mail exchange in February of 2010, when I’d asked her about the book of The Help after hearing that she’d named a cat after the woman she referred to as “Lillie Mae, the cook, cleaner, and chief nurturing spirit of our home while I was growing up.” I told her I’d thought of her while reading The Help, and she said that she’d listened to The Help on 15 CDS, and even though she usually listened to books only in the car, she closeted herself in the living room night after night, listening to the book and unable to stop. She said, “I thought it painful and moving, with only the barest flicker of hopeful light by its end. Even though I’ve realized over the years that the racist mindset is not an exclusive property of our part of the country, I still bear huge Southern guilt in regard to all those who went before me.”
In her response to my question about separate bathrooms in private homes, she said she didn’t remember Lillie Mae every using the bathroom, but she knew they didn’t have a separate toilet for her.
“What I have wondered in the last few years is what child care arrangements she made for her two boys (one year older, one year younger than I) while she was cleaning and cooking and nurturing {at our home}.”
After I saw the movie version, I asked her about her reaction to it, and she wrote that she had come out of the movie “with pain in my head and pain in my knees” because of being tense for two hours. She went on to reflect:
From personal experience I believe that a portion of the southern white population was probably as uncaring as those women in the book, that some were just as tuned in to the injustice of it all as Skeeter was, and many (like myself) who were bothered by the inequalities and insults but stood by and did nothing to try to change anything. I do know I never gave a thought to who was keeping Lillie's two boys after school while she was at our house ironing and listening to my after-school tales of the day; I loved her with all my heart, and think she was the truest source of womanly nurture I had in those years. She did not have a separate bathroom (though I never recall her going to the bathroom).
Her husband, she says, did live in a home with a separate bathroom for the maid when he was growing up in another town.
About the over-the-top characters, she said, “I think you used the proper word when you described the characters as ‘caricatures.’ I believe they were all exaggerated in an effort to get the author's point across, or else there were much worse women out in Mississippi than in SC (I find this a bit hard to believe).” Growing up, she “never encountered any white people who were as unfeeling and downright vicious toward their ‘help’ as those in the book/movie.”
I never did either.
But like Sara, I find recollections of reality bad enough.
“I do know that we paid Lillie a mere $20/week,” she said.
Fortunately her maid had “outside support” in the form of boyfriends, which connects with a comment a former boyfriend, Steve, made about his grandfather’s response when his grandmother complained that their maid was taking home food items from the pantry.
"How do you expect her to feed her family on what I pay her?"
Steve commented, “Liberals would call it patronizing, but he would call it subsidizing.”
He said their home had 5 ½ bathrooms, so there were separate toilets.
Mike, a close friend and classmate from Columbia High School, where we both graduated in 1964 after Mike’s family had been in Germany for three years, wrote back saying that his “Southern experience” differed from most because he was raised in the military, where in junior high school in Germany the only black student was also the most popular because his brother was (I hate to perpetuate the stereotype) a star football player. Mike wrote about his maid in Rock Hill, where they had lived before their stay in Germany:
{Bessie} also worked for my grandmother and aunt. The latter two did boss her around a bit while my mother (youngest child) treated her more like an equal. I was expected to call all my elders "sir" or "mam", and did or got a switching, didn't matter about color of the skin. As my father said "Treat every man as a gentleman, and every woman as a lady, till they prove otherwise."
He said that even after moving to Columbia, his family would return to Rock Hill almost every weekend “before the interstate” and often ride out to see Bessie. “Mom would buy a cured ham when they were still sharecropping and when they moved to town (in the poor section) we would still visit, usually bringing something like clothes I or my sister had outgrown - there were always young children around grandkids and great grands that could use things that no longer fit us. It was years later that I understood why the kids there stared at me when I spoke to Bessie, using "Yes Mam", and "No Mam" to her.
One reason that the scene in The Help seemed so patently false to me are these shared memories of what it was really like.
Bob, a friend and psychiatrist who calls my father “my mentor and my friend, said that his mother had the same maid for years, and when the maid retired, she and his mother talked at length on the phone daily. “Interestingly,” he noted, “she and mother died on the same day.” I checked with Bob, who said it was the same day and year, but he’s not sure of the hour!
As I read my friends’ responses, I understood better why I was hissing my objections to the throwing-out-the-sweet-old-family-servant scene.
Sara wrote that after her younger brother graduated from high school and Lillie’s help was no longer needed, Sara’s mother found a job for her at Craft-Farrow, part of the South Carolina Department of Mental Health—once part of the South Carolina State Hospital. When I saw that, I remembered a tribute one of my father’s former students, a black, had written in reference to Craft-Farrow. (I’ve typed that up separately.) Then, when Sara got married in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Lillie was there to straighten her train before she marched down sthe aisle and also helped with the post-reception when Sara and her groom had departed.
Sara went on to write:
I saw her one more time, in late December 1973, when Fred and I went to her house on Waverly Street one early morning and she cooked biscuits for us. A month later, at the age of 49, she died of some disease that had, according to story from her relative, kept her in "isolation" in the hospital for three weeks…The phone rang on Monday evening and it was Lillie's relative informing us that she had died. We had never known that she was sick. It broke my heart to hear about it after the fact. I cried day and night for a week. Deep grief combines with pregnancy hormones to produce a lot of tears. I still dream periodically that I've found her, and that she's not dead after all; I am overjoyed at her return! (I've never had this dream about my parents, strangely enough).
I also shared my memories with Sara.
I knew the separate water fountains, back of the bus for “colored people,” and “Negroes” standing at the back of Woolworth’s (McCrory’s?) was wrong, but I didn’t discuss it with my friends. The meanest comment I ever heard was from a neighbor our age who said with disbelief and horror, “Sara has a picture taken with her colored girl!” (For many years I’ve suspected that this girl’s “Swiss” father was really an escaped Nazi.) Even though during this era my dad (according to what is written in the letter) was integrating USC by having his white graduate students meet with the black interns at the “colored” section of the State Hospital, I believed a classmate who said he’d seen the result of a child born of mixed races, and its skin wasn’t exactly polka dot, but the pigmentation was “all weird”!
I remember a friend’s coming up to me in the school yard and saying, “Last night on the Perry Como Show, he kissed Eartha Kitt right on the mouth!” I think I really thought that inter-racial was “unnatural.” So I had racist notions without even knowing it.
At the first Episcopal church we attended, the pastor said we Episcopalians didn’t need to worry about Negroes coming into our sanctuary because Episcopalians had too much dignity to go where they weren’t wanted. At another Episcopal church in the Young People’s Service League (where I never noticed any “service” in the sense of help) we had a discussion about integration with our new religious director, and a really sweet Southern girl said, “If a colored person ever came to our church, I’d just leave.” The social director (a Yankee import?) said, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” The girl said, “Well, then, I’m not that good of a Christian.”
A substitute teacher told us, when Martin Luther King was on the cover of Time, that if colored students ever came to her class, she’d take their papers and just let them pile up and keep white kids’ papers in another pile to look at and correct. She’d never call on the coloreds. When our regular teacher came back, the kids wanted to report on this. “You know what Miss X said she’d do if there were colored students in her class?” Miss Pearlstine said, “Well, I hope that everybody would be civilized and treat them like human beings.”
Once a student reported on another student: “Her dad teaches at a colored college. When she told me, she burst in to tears. She’s so ashamed. Don’t tell a soul.”
But I also remember that we had a debate in Miss Spears’ class in fifth grade Schneider, and those opposing slavery won. In seventh grade, the Civil War in our textbook was called “The War between the States: The South’s Fight for Independence.” Our teacher said, “I hope it won’t upset you for me to say this, but slavery was wrong.” All the kids nodded an “of course!” sort of nod and said, “We know that!” Miss Langford said that was the first class she’d ever had where people weren’t defending slavery.
But even among the racists, I think there was a pride in being sensitive to the needs of those “less fortunate,” which to some meant “inferior.” I don’t know of ANY southerners who would have sent their old servant and her daughter away as it was done in the movie. I think they’d have said things like, “Oh, she’s a jewel. I don’t know what we’d do without her. “(I heard my seventh grade teacher describe her new maid that way.)
I met a graduate of Old Miss when we were both west of the Mississippi, and she was NOT Skeeter; she actually thought integration was the best policy. But when a black (Negro in those days) man came to our campus to speak during our coffee hour, it was Scottie the Southern Belle who asked him, “Could I get you a cup of coffee?” She put Southern Hospitality before segregation, at least for that hour.
When there was talk of integration (ten years after the fact) my little brother asked our maid Arlene how she felt about her son Willie.
“Would you like Willie to go to school with white kids?” he asked.
“Some white kids,” she responded.
I’m almost sure that our once-a-week ($5/da) maid Arlene came on the bus—standing at the back of it, of course. I think she used whichever bathroom she was near at the time she had to go, but I can’t remember ever seeing her use the bathroom!
Sara identified the pictures that had so shocked the daughter of the Swiss Nazi as those taken when she was twelve, when Lillie was going to go to New York City to work for a short period.
My expression in every photo is a woebegone one. She came back to SC after being laid off at the hat factory (she was out for a week "funeralizing" in PA and those New York Yankee people just didn't understand how the colored need to do that"--Mama's terminology). We were thrilled. Maybe my dream of her coming back to life is a reenactment of the joy I experienced when she returned to us from New York.
Steve wrote Slavery is a great "sin" of our country, exceeded only by the genocide of the indigenous population.”
This past summer, because of The Help, I got out my high school yearbooks for the first time in decades and found that every year we paid tribute to the Cafeteria Help and the Janitors. I remember that some kids made crude jokes, signing as if they were one of the black faces and writing things like “I’m so proud of you, son.” To tell you the truth, I’m just guessing what they wrote, but I know they wrote pretending that the owner of the yearbook was in some way connected to the “colored help” on the page. From one picture I have, it looks as if the cafeteria workers were privy to this and feel a bit angry. But I honestly don’t know what to make of the words—these, for example, from the 1964 yearbook.
Perhaps the jobs that are most taken for granted are those of the Janitors and the Cafeteria Workers. (Their caps) The Janitors and maids have the never ending responsibility of keeping Columbia High clean and pleasing to the eye. At least one janitor and one maid are on duty from early morning until ten at night and all are on call for extra duties as they are needed. The Cafeteria Workers have the time-consuming task of preparing wholesome meals for the large number of students and teachers that eat in the cafeteria. They are also responsible for keeping the kitchen clean.
The students of Columbia High salute our building helpers.
Does this sound like a society that would throw out their old family servant and her loving daughter?
But there’s one thing the movie version of The Help got right. Our society gave woefully little thought to the care of the children of the women working for white families.
The dialogue I’d now like to have is with the children of the people who were “the help.”
Next, I'd like to exam just what would really have happened if a "colored" maid had revealed the contents of that pie. Look for the heading "A Lynching."
