“The Help”
February 16, 2015
PAUL writes from Louisiana:
I finally watched The Help a few weeks ago. It is a 2011 movie about the supposed life of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60s. It was wonderfully acted, cast, and directed. But was it accurate? It was fiction. The author is much too young to have witnessed the events. Maybe she interviewed some maids, or maybe she did not.
The fact is that black maids routinely stole from their white employers in my actual experience in Louisiana, next to Mississippi. They would turn surly without provocation. My mother had to fire them in the early 60s. We could not afford full-time maids as the fictional rich people did in the movie. One day a week, our maids did some ironing and some vacuuming, heavy work for a working mother. Bathroom cleaning? I don’t recall. They certainly could use our bathrooms unlike the fictional ones in the movie. And we would embrace and treat them with the utmost respect: “Miss Ruth,” “Yes, ma’am,” etc. And it was not just us children; my parents never had a cross word with them. My father (a tough combat Marine) was too shy to deal with them. So much for a husband commanding one, “Fix me a sandwich” as in the movie.
My grandmother, when she was married to my rich grandfather, used to employ maids. She waited on them rather than her children. The black maids saved one of my aunts by placing her in ice water to cool her temperature while on a turpentine plantation in “evil” Mississippi. My aunt suffered some brain damage, but she prospered as a saleslady. My grandmother was worthless as a mother but a sweet, kind grandmother. Go figure.
My great-grandfather rode a horse around the plantation with a pistol in an effort to keep the black workers under control. They were mean as hell. Mr. Smith was a wild, red-haired Protestant Irishman who once emptied a dance hall when he pulled his pistol and “commenced to firing,” the version my mother heard. He had to avoid the town because the sheriff was out to get him.
So there were problems back then, but the problems were not caused by evilness on the part of most whites. My grandfather refused to join the Klan, as did the great majority of whites. The Klan was evil truly. But they had Constitutional rights, and the governments could not stop them. We Southerners are just like the rest of America; we don’t want to harm anyone. We are patriots and religious. As a minor example, my brother was about five or six when he saw some black women coming down the street. As an innately inappropriate and unpleasant person, he said, “You are niggers.” My Daddy was present and took him aside. Daddy told him never to do that again and to address black people respectfully.
And the movie fails to relate how, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blacks became even wilder and started victimizing whites with rape, murder, beatings, and theft on a scale that whites never victimized blacks after the Civil War (and before). A close friend lives in Jackson, and he tells of a black radio broadcaster who announces on Friday evenings that the black gunshots will soon begin. The black broadcaster obviously has a problem with black culture. It is why my friend’s family lives, and many blacks have moved, outside of Jackson. Jackson is now a hellhole. So much for the misleading The Help.
