The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Instead of offering you an entire series, I thought I'd offer you a multimedia experience--a book released in 2009 and the movie based on the book which will be released on August 12. The Help is a story that is in no way about me, but is, in many ways, about all of us.

The Help is a story of social graces, social inequality, and social atrocities in the 1960s. It is a story of Skeeter, one young, white, well-to-do woman in Jackson, Mississippi, who wants her own job, her own love, her own life and begins to find those things while writing a book. It is a story about the women in Skeeter's book who have been working for as long as they can remember; it is a story of black women who ARE the help. These women cook and clean for, wait on, and, in many instances, raise the children of middle class and wealthy white women. They work for less than minimum wage, and none of them "get the Social Security" or, equally as important, job security.

As I said, so much of this book is in no way about me. When I re-read that last paragraph, I see one connection to one character; I'm white. I've never hired help or been hired help. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks were people in my history books, not contemporaries. I hate SEC football. My father has never owned a plantation, but I've also never known poverty. Yet even without any obvious connection to any of the characters, this book really spoke to me, because the struggles it outlines are not limited to one place, one time or one people.

This is a story about the way we are when we think no one (or no one of consequence) is looking. This is a story about the way we are with people we don't understand and don't know. This is the story about the way we are with children; with our friends; with privilege; with adversity. I hope you read it. I hope it speaks to you, too, because it is, simply, a story about the way we are.