"The Help" Offers A Reflection on Courage

The Help is a movie based on the book of the same name by Kathryn Stockett. It’s the story of the help: the black maids in Jackson, MS in the early 1960s.

It’s about their relationship with their white employers, the relationships with each other, and how one young woman—Eugenia Phelen, nicknamed Skeeter—helps the maids tell their stories.

Skeeter, portrayed by actress Emma Stone, has returned home after graduating from “Ole Miss,”—the University of Mississippi. She wrangled a job at the local newspaper writing the “Miss Myrna” housecleaning tips column. Skeeter asks Aibileen, her best friend’s maid, to help her with the answers to the questions sent in by the readers. Aibileen, played by actress Viola Davis, has been helping in white people’s homes for years. She has cooked and cleaned in many white households and cared for many white children.

One day, Skeeter asks Aibileen if she would tell her stories of what it has been like to be a black maid in white persons’ homes. In the movie, Skeeter said that this perspective has not been seen before. Aibileen turns her down. There would be too much risk in doing something like that, even with names changed and an anonymous author. If discovered, there would be trouble, job loss or worse, and this real fear stopped Aibileen. 

A short time later, there is a scene in the movie that takes place in a church. The young, black male preacher looks out into the congregation and says, “Courage is doing what’s right in spite of weakness of the flesh.”

I could tell by Aibileen’s facial expressions and body language that she is being convicted as the preacher is speaking. In the exuberant worship service she is quiet, and to me, she tries to make herself small and invisible as she sits in the church pew.

Later, Aibileen goes to Miss Skeeter and tells her she will help with the stories and when Miss Skeeter asks her, “What made you change your mind?” Aibileen says, “God did.”

God changed Aibileen’s mind. We are told no more than that in the movie. What we do know is that Aibileen is the first of the maids to tell Skeeter her stories, telling about her life knowing it would be written down, perhaps published and read by many.  

The faith message for me is about courage and how hard it can be to speak the truth. 

Aibileen lets her best friend Minny, played by Octavia Spencer, know what she is doing. Minny—bold, sassy Minny—who is a fabulous cook but can’t keep a job because of her temperament, joins her friend.

After a maid is arrested, many of the town’s maids come to Skeeter so she can record their experiences. There might be repercussions from the white employers and white citizens should the book be published, or if this writing collaboration is discovered. Even so, the secret manuscript is on its way to completion.

Courage. Aibileen wrestled with just how much courage she would need to do what Skeeter had asked her to do. She knew from all of her life experience and all that she had witnessed that telling her truth would be a right and good thing to do.

It was a different time, America, the 1960s. Mississippi, “the South” was different than it is now.

The Civil Rights movement took courage.

That decade may be in the past, but the cause is not done.

Discrimination in many forms still exists. Not in law books as it once was the situation in this country but still in some hearts and in some minds.

We still need courage.

This movie reminds me that we have come a long way. I am humbled when I consider the courage of heart, will, soul, mind that had to fill the length and depth and breadth of the changes that needed to be made so that black maids didn’t have to use separate toilets in the homes they worked in, as shown in the movie.

It is a triumph whenever truth is allowed to be told.

Courage is still needed. Racism exists. Gender issues are not resolved. Other human rights issues such as ageism, classism and religious intolerance deeply concern many.  

I believe that truth will stand. It may have to be told again and again and again for every hardened heart to soften and for change to occur.

As Aibileen said, sometimes even God can change our minds.