"The Help" helps us understand relationships

Kathryn Stockett has written an extraordinary first novel, "The Help," which has won a deserved place on the New York Times bestseller list. It is one of the few books that looks honestly at the extraordinary relationship between blacks and whites in the segregated South. The relationship was sometimes adversarial and sometimes oppressive and even cruel. But it could also be loving, kind and respectful.

Stockett looks at the women who kept house and raised children for aristocratic white families in the early 1960s, just as this traditional relationship was being challenged and changed. Reading the book, I thought of Sen. Sam Ervin, who boasted that his black maid was considered a member of the family and, naturally, accompanied the family to Washington, D.C., when he was appointed to the U.S. Senate. I also thought of baseball great Ty Cobb, who when accused of racism, responded that he couldn't be racist because he had been nursed by a black nanny. Both responses now seem quaintly naive, if not blind.

I know little about the lives of white aristocrats and their relationship with black servants (my family of "lintheads" was far from aristocratic), but Stockett's fiction rings true. Using multiple narrators, she manages to get inside the minds of the black women who cared for, cooked for, and cleaned for white families, usually for very minimal wages. She reveals women who deeply loved the white children for whom they were surrogate mothers, disciplinarians and moral exemplars. But these women also chafed under the disrespectful attitudes, petty tyranny and repressiveness of some of their employers.

Stockett sets her novel in Jackson, Miss., just as the civil rights movement was gaining its stride and as segregationists were erecting more barriers to ensure the survival of their "peculiar institution." Some critics have claimed "The Help" stereotypes black women and white oppressors, but others have disagreed. I found the characters true to life and as varied as any group of personalities as you would find in any demographic group. Some white women were tyrants, some were social climbers, some were insecure, some were kind and loving. The characters, both white and black, ran the gamut of human existence.

The relationship between what was essentially two separate, independent societies, one white and one black, was quite complex. Black women could rear white children, feeding, disciplining and guiding them, but they could not enter a white home's front door. The intimacy of the relationship between women who cooked, cleaned, laundered, nursed and organized a household could not help but be intimate, but few white families dared admit how much they depended on their black maids even as they fought the societal tide that threatened that relationship.

To the extent that we remember or study the segregation era today, we usually concentrate on the legal challenges, the protests and the triumph of human dignity over Jim Crow laws and segregationist traditions. But unless we look more closely, we miss the mutual dependency and genuine friendships that existed despite the legal and social barriers. I think "The Help" is an important book for what it tells us, both good and bad, about an era happily put behind us.

Another recent book, which I have frequently recommended, also reveals the complex and sometimes contradictory relationships between the races in the South as segregation was ending. Doug Marlette's "Magic Time" is a wonderful novel that recounts the turbulent 1960s as well as the current day in the friendship between two young men, one white and one black, in a small town in the South. I highly recommend it, too.