Kathryn Stockett's novel "The Help"

Kathryn Stockett is 40 years old, slight and graceful with blond hair and a wide-eyed, slightly startled expression. She lives in an elegantly decorated house in Atlanta, Georgia; when I arrive, her husband, Keith, who works in software technology, is out back marinating pork for the next day’s barbecue, and her six-year-old daughter, Lila, is at the swimming-pool with some neighbours. Stockett is completely charming. She talks like a Southern belle, though it’s probably the English concept of a Southern belle; 'Would y’all care for something to sip on?’ she asks. She serves tea and cake while telling me about when she attended 'culinary school’, caressing the words in her high sing-song voice.

We take our tea on to the doorstep in front of her large detached house in a neighbourhood that is actually very close to ugly downtown Atlanta, but is a world apart: a leafy park, ancient oak trees, beautiful houses, mostly built in the 1920s, with wide lawns front and back. It is like those idyllic streets where the teenagers in American horror films live.

Stockett is telling me about her grandparents, who played a big part in her life when she was a child. Her grandmother Caroline grew up in Shanghai in a family of missionaries ('Grandmother went over there with her family to save the souls of the heathens’), returning to Mississippi when war broke out. 'She came back to settle down and start a family with a very strict idea of how things should be between people of colour, coming from Shanghai, where there was no middle class. And of course that is exactly how Mississippi did things, so she fitted right in.’

She married Kathryn’s grandfather, Robert Stockett Sr, and employed a maid called Demetrie to bring up their two sons, one of whom was Kathryn’s father, Robert Jr. ('We call them maids,’ Kathryn says. 'I’m told that’s not PC now; we should call them housekeepers.’) Robert Stockett Sr was an equestrian and he ran a stable, with retired horses given to him by the Southern Cavalry. Everyone in Mississippi knew about Stockett’s Stables. 'It was a place where people gathered; a lot of older men came there to sit on the porch and talk; people would say that there were more laws made on the porch of Stockett Stables than in the state capital.’

Robert Snr, (to whom the book is dedicated), who died only recently, aged 98, was 6ft 4in and wore knee-length riding boots. 'He was good friends with [the writer] Eudora Welty; she had TB and at the time the only thing recommended for TB was fresh air and sunshine, so she’d go and hang out at the stables; but she’d get upset if those men said too many curse words.’

On the other side of town, Stockett grew up with her older brother and sister, Susan and Rob. Their parents divorced when she was six. 'After that, my mother would go out of town a lot – she was in her thirties, she was good-looking and she needed some space. Mother was wild. She wore high heels and low-cut sweaters and she dated a journalist who traveled all over the world. So she handed us over to Father and he would stick us in the motel.’

Her father owned Ramada Motels in Mississippi. Sometimes Demetrie would go and look after the children in the motel, more often Stockett would go to her grandparents’ house after school, where she would stay. 'It was just heaven for a kid: you had horses and there were people who’d catch them for you and saddle them up and you could just roam everywhere; there was tons of land to explore, and a haybarn and the sawdust barn – imagine a room of this size full of sawdust shavings? And there was a rope swing in there, and we could drive old trucks around…’

Mostly, she liked the fact that everything stayed the same at her grandparents; they ate lunch and supper there every day. 'There was always a big gathering for lunch. If you came to lunch once my grandparents would set a place for you for the rest of your life, and expect you to come.’

But she was a little bit displaced. 'I didn’t always know where my mother was, I didn’t know where my father was, but I always knew where Demetrie was. I would go to my grand-parents’ six days a week. Demetrie was always there.’

Stockett’s life growing up in Jackson in the late 1970s is not really comparable with the time her book is set in the early 1960s; but even now most of the well-off white families in Mississippi have maids, and most of them are black. 'The relationship between white families and the black help doesn’t exist any more the way it did; the intimacy is gone. It’s a good thing, because black people were hugely dependant on their employers – we were their source of income. Demetrie didn’t have a car; she didn’t have health insurance. If she needed the doctor we took her, and we paid. And that was the understanding: you come and work for our family, you look after us for the rest of our lives, and we’ll look after you for the rest of your life. Now the help is being paid better, they’re being treated on more equal terms, but we’ll never have that intimacy with them again. Blacks and whites are not close any more in Mississippi. But that had to happen. We had to separate and break off that dependancy so that down the road we can come together as equals.’

In her afterword to the book, Stockett quotes the writer and journalist Howell Raines: 'There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.’

Stockett says it took her 20 years to realise the irony of the situation with her beloved Demetrie. 'We would tell anybody, “Oh, she’s just like a part of our family,” and that we loved the domestics that worked for us so dearly – and yet they had to use a bathroom on the outside of the house.’

Did Demetrie have her own bathroom? Stockett looks steadily at me. 'Yes.’

And did you just accept that at the time? 'I never knew about it! I’m so naive and stupid that I never gave a thought to where she went to the bathroom until I was 20. I’m so embarrassed about this. It never occurred to me that she had a separate bathroom, but when I came home from college I found this door on the outside of my grandparents’ house.’

The Stockett family went to Demetrie’s funeral, it was the first time Stockett had been to a black church. 'I’d never had any interaction with black people except those who worked for our family. And I couldn’t believe how overt their emotions were. There were people speaking out during the sermon, joining in, agreeing with the eulogy, singing loud solos impromptu… but what really struck me as heartbreaking was how Demetrie’s husband was carrying on.’

Demetrie’s husband was called Plunk, and he was drunk and abusive, so much so that she slept with a pistol underneath her pillow. 'As I understand it he beat the crap out of her, but at the funeral this man was wandering the aisles, screaming, fainting from heartbreak that Demetrie was dead, calling out her name and throwing himself at the coffin – people were dragging him away, soothing him. It horrified our family. I was 16. I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut.’

Stockett would beg her grandparents to be allowed to go to Demetrie’s house but they always said no. Finally, just one time, they agreed. 'I was probably seven. I got to look around for five minutes. It was a strange feeling to realise that Demetrie had another life; it was my first awakening that she was a person with an identity outside the Stockett family.’


Book Club Reacts to "The Help"


Kathryn Stockett's Hometown Reaction


Katie Couric speaks with a book club from Jackson, Mississippi to get their reaction to the book and its description of the racial boundaries in the segregated South of the 1960s.

The Maid's Tale: Kathryn Stockett Examines Slavery and Racism in America's Deep South

Jessamy Calkin of the UK Telegraph writes, "The maid's tale: Kathryn Stockett examines slavery and racism in America's Deep South." As a [white] child in America’s Deep South in the 1970s, Kathryn Stockett was not really aware of the racial divides around her. Now she has written a novel about the community in 1960s Mississippi from the point of view of the black servants.

The British cover to Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help – about the experiences of black maids in Mississippi in the early 1960s – is a period photograph of a little white girl in a pushchair flanked by two black women in starched white uniforms – the 'help’ of the book’s title.

The photograph, which was found in the National Congress archives, was deemed too controversial to be used on the American cover. The spectre of racism in the South is still raw and political correctness works overtime.

When Stockett was first shown the photograph, which was inscribed Port Gibson, Mississippi, she sent it to a friend of hers, who, in turn, forwarded it to his mother. Back came the reply, 'Why, that’s just little Jane Crisler Wince on the corner of Church Street – she had two maids – her family owns the local paper…’ Stockett was thrilled with this information. 'That the whole South is just one small town, and we pass each other in the grocery store every day is a myth I love to perpetuate,’ she says.The Help took five years to write, got at least 45 rejection letters from agents, and when finally published went straight into the American bestseller lists. It has sold a quarter of a million copies so far in the US, and is still selling briskly.

The book is set in Jackson, Mississippi, just before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. There are three narrators: the wise and serene Aibileen, who works for the Leefolt household, bringing up their little daughter Mae Mobley; Minny, Aibileen’s feisty friend, the best cook in town, who is prone to losing her job because of her big mouth; and tall, skinny Miss Skeeter, so called because of her resemblance to a mosquito when she was a baby, a white Southern belle with ambitions to be a writer.

Skeeter is disturbed when she hears her friends in the Junior League (a sort of American women’s institute that does charitable works) discussing their latest project, the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, which decrees that all domestic help should have separate lavatories outside the house, in order not to spread disease.

Skeeter decides to cross the divide and write a book, based on the experiences of the maids, an anonymous oral history, but most are too frightened to take part – this was a time when domestic help could be fired at the drop of a hat, when one word from a powerful white employer could put them in jail for 'stealing’, when a young gardener was beaten nearly to death for using the wrong lavatory at the golf club. The endemic racism that the book describes is so casual in its cruelty and indifference that it is profoundly shocking to realise that the time it describes was only 45 years ago.

It’s a risky thing to do – being white and well off – to write in a black voice, especially writing in the vernacular. The dialect Stockett employs is like another language; it is a clever act of ventriloquism, which draws you completely into a world of okra and fried chicken and peach cobbler, but a world with menacing undertones. It is history on the cusp of change, and Stockett has captured the unique complexities of the relationships between white women who will entrust the upbringing of their babies to someone with whom they will not share a bathroom. In the book Aibileen always leaves the families she works for as soon as the child she’s looking after starts to see her in a different light.'I want to stop that moment from coming – and it come in ever white child’s life – when they start to think that coloured folks ain’t as good as whites.’ (source: UK Telegraph, by Jessamy Calkin)

Warwick's Books Presents Kathryn Stockett