Questions for The Help

I knew I wouldn’t get a lot of writing done this summer. Lack of structure means lack of discipline, and flighty focus. So I got serious about making time for reading. I read several very satisfying books, some of which I’ll “review” here before the year runs out.

For starters: I finally read The Help. I liked it. I'm not going to offer a dense review. Countless more capable journalists have done that already. Instead, I'll share my take-away:

My reading The Help coincided with the death of Sherman Helmsley, the actor most famous for his TV role as George Jefferson. You remember “The Jeffersons”: George and Weezie (a.k.a. Louise) and their son, Lamont, “moving on up” to a de-luxe apartment on the East Side. They were the black family who made it big in the dry cleaning business, leaving behind their white, working class neighbors (Archie and Edith Bunker) back in Jamaica, Queens.  As a child, I was struck by the character Florence, the Jeffersons' (black) maid.  She arrived in the morning, and left around suppertime, donning a maid’s uniform and a sassy attitude. Her irreverent reluctance to do any serious housework caused constant friction between herself and her employers, and triggered big laughs. She puttered around, complaining that she needed to put her feet up, asking Weezie to bring her a cool drink while she was in the kitchen anyway, and it all made me wonder, Why did the Jeffersons have a maid? What did Weezie do all day? She didn’t work… and didn’t she feel uncomfortable having a black lady working as her servant?

Marla Gibbs as Florence Johnston, courtesy Sony TV

When I was about seven, my mother hired a “housekeeper” who came to clean our apartment twice a week, and kept an eye on me until my mother got home. Joyce was her name. I remember Joyce as a somber, middle-aged black woman who dusted, vacuumed and mopped the floors without much comment or kindness. My mother remembers that Joyce broke things, and that she only did a good job the first day she came. Joyce only lasted a few months. After Joyce, we moved on to teenaged babysitters, and the house just stayed dirty.

My husband and I have a “cleaning lady” who comes once a week for three hours. I feel ridiculous having a cleaning lady, since I’m not earning a regular salary these days. But my days are full, and my head is spinning with project ideas that will never be born if I stop to thoroughly clean the house. I tidy up constantly, but real cleaning doesn’t make my daily to-do list. So we have Mita, who is probably ten years my junior, as agreeable as can be, and blonde. And I just think it’s funny (funny weird, not funny ha-ha) that I have a white cleaning lady. Not because I think cleaning ladies should be black! But because my relationship with Mita is a reversal of the ones I saw all around me growing up, and still what I see everywhere in the world of nannies.

I’m back to The Help, with its rich depictions of mid-century Southern women, perpetuating and withstanding a dehumanizing status quo, until they chose to upend it. All of the ill-conceived opinions that the women on both sides of that world held about and against each other... I’m sure so much of it lingers today, even in our “advanced state of coexistence”.  I wonder what goes on in Mita’s head, what she thinks about me and my family, and our arrangement. I wonder what Joyce thought of me and my mom, a divorced white lady with a black child, in that apartment in the Bronx.