Book review of The Help
Finishing reading The Help, what I can feel are two things, courage and freedom.
In fact there are many books about the emancipation of slaves, and the most famous what I have read is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which made me cry a lot. But what is different about these two books is that the story of The Help is about women, a white girl who had graduated from university for a short time and two black women who had worked for white people for a long time. They worked together for reformation.
The story happened in Mississippi, where was the most serious racial discrimination at that time. Skeeter came back to the town from university and was together with her friends, those were controlled by the social consciousness at that time. She felt sorry about them. She didn’t hate blacks, she even liked them and she loved the black woman who raised her up. But what made her sorrow was that her mother had fired that woman for some special but innocent reasons. And the other two leading roles are Aibileen and Minny. There is a question that Skeeter asked Aibileen touched me a lot is what does it feel like to raise a white child when your own child is at home being looked after by someone else? Yes, this is the real life of Aibileen. She spent half of her life raising white children, she loved them and they loved her.
But they had to be apart sometimes and one day children will be like their parents, hating or being afraid of blacks. And the story of Minny may be much more pitiful. She had a horrible husband who liked drinking and beating her sometimes. When she lost her job once she had to let her girl leave off study for affording the debt. But she is a tough woman, she is brave. She can take revenge on her bad master Hiily even she felt a little regretting after that.
I can feel all of them, including three leading women and the other roles, were asking for freedom. Skeeter wanted her friends to treat blacks equally and she wanted her baby sister, she wanted to get out of that world. Aibileen and Minny wanted to be treated equally, they didn’t like those special washing room or being forbidden in masters’, at least that time the society think their employers were their masters. When one black man was shot, what they asked for was just safety. And for those racists in the book like Hilly, they also need freedom, they just lived in the bubble that society made for them.
At the beginning of the book, at the time that black women didn’t decide to help Skeeter. I can feel contradiction in their mind. Masters didn’t treat them like normal people, their husband forced them to do hard jobs, and they faced dangerous being attacked by racists. But all of these terrible things can’t make them make a decision. They wanted freedom and equality and they dare not. They were afraid of facing with a worse
world if they asked for. They had to look after their children and they cared their husband. So there were many reasons making them tolerate. But when all of these become heavy enough, they’ll stand up to fight for something.
But sometimes we can’t get what we want or need. We need courage to do something. Aibileen said that the reason she changed her mind to help Skeeter is God. Courage isn’t just about being brave, courage is daring to do what is right in spite of the weakness of our flesh. We need to do, we should love.
We do many things for love and because of love we can have much courage. Even the reason we can have book like The Help is love. There are many things care in our life. In the book we can find it everywhere. It’s pure, it doesn’t concern racial, age and sexy. Skeeter loved her black baby sister, Aibileen and Mae loved each other, Minny loved Aibileen and her girl, Skeeter’s mother supported and loved her. All of us have it. So we can always have reason to do things we think right because there will be someone behind us to support us. This is important, because of those people and those feeling we dare do those thing we dared not! So love is the well of courage.
Every time when we read book like The Help, what we can pay attention on is those cold people’s cold behavior, those tragedies happened on poor people. Why? Why those things would happen? We seldom ask
ourselves. Blacks made Hilly life better, but she still hated them even she should appreciated the, Why? Perhaps she didn’t have the reason, she just did it because that time made her like that. Many things have no reason. The reason why we do that is we are numb. We won’t suspect what we are in. So we need people like Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. We need some brave men to do something to change the world, they have new ideas, they have courage, they dare to do dangerous things ignoring others.
Maybe you are in a terrible time or a terrible place now, don’t be afraid. Even god didn’t guide you , you can do something by yourself. Everything can be changed by you, all you need is just courage, and you will have a whole free sky.