The Help by Kathryn Sockett

The book I finished reading is called "The Help" by Kathryn Sockett. It's about Skeeter Phelean, a woman who never looked the same as the others with her tall figure and messy hair, and her dreams of becoming a writer, instead of just a house wife.The book is written in a format so in different chapters you can have the narrator be 2 different main characters; Aibileen, and Minny both house maids working for the white women in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter wanted a great story idea that she could pitch to the big publishing company in NY, but needed a good idea. Better then good, no one had thought of before. She decided to write a book of short stories on the lives of "the help" working for the ladies in Jackson.

One of the things that influenced her to do this story was because racism was a big problem at the time in Jackson, MI 1962 (when the story takes place), and she thought of it as in issue, unlike her other friends who think colored people "are just too different than us." Even though Skeeter knows everyone is just a person on the inside know matter the skin color. Her friend Hilly started to make a "Home Help Sanitation Initiative" because "everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do," as Hilly would say. The initiative is a a letter urging/persuading people to not let the "help" use the bathrooms inside the ladies houses, but to build one outside to "keep everyone safe," something else Hilly said when she was talking about the initiative in the book.

Another one of the things that influenced Skeeter to write her story in the first place using Aibileen and Minny was the fact that no one had wrote about it before, must less talked about it or faced it directly. During the story many people from the Jackson community go march for equal rights with Martin Luther King, so there is parts of the story where Sockett shows how the time were changing at that period in time. I my opinion I think the people like Skeeter who didn't agree on the way African Americans were treated, were scared of what would happen to them if they spoke up. Which is why the book was written by anonymous, and all the names and places were changed. In the story a young "colored person was beaten blind just because he accidentally used the white person bathroom.

I really did like this story and the message Skeeter showed throughout the story of  not only fighting for what you believe in, but being brave. She could of stopped writing the stories whenever she wanted, but didn't. Some parts of this story I did find upsetting like when you would hear the characters talking about African Americans like they aren't even people, like weird aliens that have come to take over. But I'm not always interested in a realistic/ historical fiction story, but this really gave me a new opinion on how detailed this genre could be.