Harry L. Watson - Southern Cultures: The Help Special Issue

Jocelyn R. Neal, director

Edward L. Ayers University of Richmond

E. M. Beck Sociology, Emeritus, University of Georgia

Catherine W. Bishir North Carolina State University Libraries

Merle Black Political Science, Emory University

James C. Cobb History, University of Georgia

Peter A. Coclanis History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thadious Davis English, University of Pennsylvania

Pam Durban English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William R. Ferris History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Wayne Flynt History, Emeritus, Auburn University

Thavolia Glymph History, Duke University

Rayna Green National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Larry J. Griffin Sociology and History, Georgia Southern University

Ferrel Guillory The Program on Public Life, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Peggy Hargis Sociology, Georgia Southern University

Trudier Harris English, Emerita, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fred Hobson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lisa Howorth Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi

Patrick J. Huber History, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Anne Goodwyn Jones English, University of Florida

Michael Kreyling English, Vanderbilt University

Louis Kyriakoudes History, University of Southern Mississippi

Malinda Maynor Lowery History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Michael OBrien History, University of Cambridge

Ted M. Ownby Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

James L. Peacock Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Theda Perdue History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

C. David Perry University of North Carolina Press

Tom Rankin Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University

John Shelton Reed Sociology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anne Firor Scott History, Emerita, Duke University

Bland Simpson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vincas P. Steponaitis Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Steven Stowe History, Indiana University

John M. Vlach American Studies, George Washington University

David Wilkins American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota

Charles R. Wilson History, University of Mississippi

Southern Cultures Copyright 2014 Center for the Study of the American South
Indexed in Humanities International Complete. Back Issues are available through www.SouthernCultures.org

As Kimberly Wallace-Sanders discusses in her essay, many African American women during the Jim Crow era had to spend more time raising white children than their own. Studio portrait of seated African American woman and young girl, Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Mss. 3778, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries.

Mammy is one of the most vivid characters on the southern cultural landscape. Immortalized in songs, stories, and films, Mammy is the endlessly loving, eternally loyal black woman who nurses, scolds, comforts, and guides her white charges from the cradle to adulthood and beyond, dependable in every emergency from colic to a failed romance. In one famous incarnation, she is Scarlett OHaras indispensable emotional anchor; in another, she is William Faulkners Dilsey, whose steadfast moral plumb line marks the Compson familys inexorable decline. Ageless, sexless, and undistracted by her own children, she pours endless love on her white babies, teaches them (and their mothers) everything important from manners to biscuit-making, and upholds family standards even when her white folks are tempted to crumple. Shes like a member of the family, they assure all comers, echoing the planters faded evocation of our family, black and white. Lauded for her endless gifts and selfless generosity, she is summoned from the kitchen to refute the critics of southern race relations; cruelly circumscribed and taken for granted, she silently confirms them all. In an age of unstable families and revolutionized race relations, its no wonder that Mammy is controversial.

In 2009, white Mississippi author Kathryn Stockett offered a new perspective on Mammy in her debut novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, The Help tells the story of Skeeter Phelan, an ambitious young white woman who tries to launch her writing career with a household column for the local paper. Knowing nothing of housekeeping, she persuades her friends longsuffering maid Aibileen to share her knowledge. Their clandestine relationship opens Skeeters eyes to the rank injustices of a maids life and Jacksons racial order, which is coming apart even as the story progresses, despite the best efforts of the citys leaders and their wives to hold the line in public and in their private households. Skeeters dawning (but always incomplete) insight gives her the idea for a book of stories from Jackson maids, anonymously telling the sad, bitter details of exploitation and meanness from their employers. Parallel chapters told by Aibileen and her friend Minny explain how they preserve their own dignity by pushing back, one by writing and prayer, the other by open confrontation. Of the two maids, Aibileen more closely matches Mammys classic profile, as she lavishes love on her last and latest white baby, Mae Mobley, but makes her own sacrifice a form of resistance by using steady affirmation and encouragement to protect Mae Mobley from her weak mother and a sexist society. In the end, the community of Jackson maids gain the satisfaction of seeing their stories told in public, collectively shaming their tyrannical employers, and Skeeter rides the books success to a promising New York career. Should the reader be troubled by these unequal outcomes? The text does not say.

The Help has been wildly successful, selling over 5 million copies in 35 countries, spending over 100 weeks on the