The Help Needs help

Watched half hour of The Help and turned it off. I committed the cardinal sin of watching a movie that I READ THE BOOK. The movie was just so over the top and so obviously slanted toward women and so Mad Men esq and so Southern The View/Devil Wears Prada/Dont We Look Great in sixties garb that it was nauseating with the overplayed saccharine accents that woman in Jackie Kennedy garb just cant help themselves doing and  beating us over the head with AREN'T WE THE PRETTIEST RACIST WOMEN YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. They needed some homely women at least to balance it out.

But it really was Hollywood. Hollywood ruined their own movie. Mary Steamburgen(sic) was ridiculous in her portrayal of the Jewish Editor sitting on her desk talking to someone who had never published anything like she had all the time in the world for budding writers who want to write radical books about racial relations in Mississippi. Sissy Spacek should have just kept drinking or playing bridge or whatever she was doing. Hattie McDaniels was rolling in her grave at the short distance Hollywood has traveled for black actresses. Mammy was more authentic in every way than the maids.

It turned into a Nora Ephron vehicle about Skeeters empowerment. Skeeter who screeched along under her mothers fierce eye and finally blows the whistle. She was about as believable as my left foot. So wide eyed so surprised, so obtuse at the revelations of racial mores in the society she had grown up in as a privileged white girl provided. The book did not suffer this way because the book could float into the readers mind and we could edit out the fluff and the dribble that did not pertain. Hollywood lives in fluff and drivel.

And it will sweep the Oscars. No doubt about it. I could see that in the twenty minutes I watched. Take women and put them in a racist time and give them kicking dresses and have them pee every five minutes (it seemed everyone was on the toilet) then you have a winner. I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded against Magnolia and lace and urine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Real Women of "The Help"

In Virginia and Baltimore everyone had a cleaning person. Or a maid. Or a cook. Or an Annie. Or a Belle. Or a Polly. All my friends had black "Help." I would go to their homes and Annie would make us sandwiches and mysteriously disappear in the evenings and then come back early the next day. That was in Baltimore. In Virginia my father was raised by Addie. I wrote about her in Tobacco Sticks and she was the mother of my character in more ways than once. She was the classic Gone With The Wind Mammy who was large and drank a lot and swore even more. But that was who raised my dad. His mother was any of the woman of The Help playing bridge and drinking highballs.

For me in Baltimore we had Belle. She was large too and more updated than the Virginia Help that actually wore uniforms. I remember looking through a fan vent once and seeing our neighbors the Helfers maid doing laundry. She saw me and waved and I ducked back down. It was standard to assume everyone had Help and they were all black. That is until we moved up to Chicago. Suddenly there were no black people in the suburbs. I wondered where they all went. They were in the city and everyone had Polish cleaning woman. My mother found Polly then; the last black maid in Chicago.

Polly carried a gun for the bus rides in Chicago. I think it was a thirty eight and I saw the silver handle sticking out her purse. She said it was a Saturday Night Special. She said she had been bothered more than once and stuck it in the face of one man and said you want to live NI&^%$? He did and never messed with her again. Polly stayed with my mother even after the divorce and then she just disappeared and hard times along with the end of something, maybe an era, did away with any type of HELP after that.

When my wife and I had cleaning people they were always Polish. I never even wondered if they would be black. They charged so much we stopped and haven't had any help for years. We are the Help now. But when I read THE HELP, I knew those women very well.  In a way, I grew up with them.