The Help

Before I read The Help, I had one of those epic Facebook discussions on a friend's wall, about the racial divide in the South, how people up north don't get it (she is a professor at Drake in Iowa), and had all these ideas and indignance that I needed to share.  I grew up in a racially, culturally, and socioeconomically divided city.  Black people went to public schools, which were terribly underfunded and in a sad state- some of them didn't even have air conditioning.  The whites that could afford it went to private school, mostly Catholic.  There was little to no mixing.  Whites had their golf and tennis clubs, neighborhoods, Mardi Gras clubs and parades, and suburbs.  Blacks had theirs.

New Orleans East was built as a haven for whites, with big homes and was far enough from the city... and then it was populated with blacks looking to get out of the inner city.  The white people then headed for the Northshore of Lake Ponchartrain, and build out in that area exploded.  What I never understood, and still do not understand, was the disparity of it all.  It is unfair in a lot of ways, but white people have not yet understood what they have done to themselves.  Segregating their kids into private schools and then paying taxes on public schools is paying twice.  Giving no oversight or funding to public schools means that the graduates of those schools have no skills when they graduate, some of them can't even read and write.  This is the job pool that white employers have to draw from for their businesses, and spend extra money training things that could have been learned in high school.  Also, moving across the lake means an hour commute to and from the city, and an hour and a half to the CBD.


It's that mindset that made me want to do things differently in my own life.  When I went to college in Texas, my friends were black, because they were the people I had the most in common with, not because I wanted to make a statement.  My parents saw things differently.  I brought my friends home for Mardi Gras one year and my father was going to take us to the Proteus den to see the floats lined up for the parade.  He was dismayed when he met my friends, because then he couldn't.  Proteus was a white organization in 1994.  In 1996 I was invited to be a maid in the Proteus ball.  I invited my best friend, who happened to be black.  My father had a fit when he found out.  I explained that because she was in Texas, and Mardi Gras balls happen in the middle of classes, that she wouldn't be coming, but that I wanted her to have an invitation.  The captain of the ball called me at my apartment to berate me for inviting her.  I defended my position, with the same argument I gave my father.

The ball was a fiasco.  My father failed to tell my boyfriend (now husband) what to wear, so he was wearing the wrong tux, and was not allowed to be my escort until after the ball.  He was able to switch vests and ties with a friend.  All of the friends that I invited did not have the right tux either, so were made to sit in the balcony and observe.  The members of the krewe of Proteus were rude, disrespectful, and downright cold to me.  There was a part of the presentation when the members (who were masked so you couldn't see their faces) threw beads to the maids.  We were all dressed up in debutante dresses and white gloves to the elbows.  I had so many beads thrown at my face and arms that I had red welts.

When I was in high school, David Duke ran for governor against Edwin Edwards. It was a case of the Klu Klux Klan wizard versus the gambler.  Who was worse?  In 1993 that was a tough question for people to answer, if you can believe that.  I thought Duke was disgusting.  I couldn't believe that my home state that I loved so much was so damn ignorant.  I couldn't believe that he actually got to that point, that really, NO ONE else was out there?  He was walking in a parade on Mardi Gras day down the streets of Metairie, the white suburb where I grew up, waving to everyone like he was the king of the world.  My sweet boyfriend (now husband) knew how much I hated him, and started berating and screaming at him that he was a worthless piece of dirt.  He used stronger language that I won't go into.  I was shocked, because this was in front of his friends, who were perched on top of a truck flying a confederate flag.

I think Sherry had a lot to do with that.  She was our housekeeper from when I was twelve until my mom got remarried in 2002.  She was, and is, my other mama.  My parents divorced when I was ten, and my mom put together childcare after school in a variety of ways until I was about twelve, when Sherry came to work for us.  She had worked for my uncle before he moved to the Northshore with his family.  I'd get a ride home after school (except Wednesdays when I went with my dad to my grandparents' house), and she would be there.  She would also stay with us when my mom had to go out of town for a conference or overnight for a retreat.

My family had always employed maids.  My grandparents on my mom's side had a huge house with a separate entrance out back and a separate tiny bathroom at the bottom of the stairs leading to the basement.  According to my mom, the maids weren't treated that well.  Called the N word, treated differently than the rest of the family.  We had a maid named Adeline before Sherry.  She was fired for stealing alcohol.  The maid before her took me on the bus and was promptly fired.  My mom says that she wanted things to be different with Sherry, and she was treated like one of the family.  She came to all of our birthday parties, events, graduations, weddings, you name it.  She told us she loved us and we told her we loved her.

I really never gave our relationship much deep thought before I read The Help.  At least, I never looked at it from her point of view.  I thought it was simple, love between me and her.  She raised me, she knew all of my secrets, my boyfriends, when my period "came down".  She made no bones about telling me which of my loves she liked and which ones she didn't.  We had "girl talk" that my mother wasn't privy to, that she didn't want to know about.  She loved me through my migraines in high school and babied me when I needed to take naps every day.  She took care of me when I had the chicken pox at sixteen.  She loved me for me.  Just me, had no expectations of what she thought I should be, or do with my life.  She loved just me, and for that I will be forever grateful.

After I read the book and saw the movie, which are two different entities entirely, I began to delve into what it may have really been like for her, working for us.  She was paid what I thought was a decent wage, what my mother could afford.  I remember her always complaining about her "light bill" or phone bill and saying that she was about to be cut off, or was cut off.  I didn't get until now that she was complaining to me because she might have thought I would tell my mom.  She never outright asked me for help.

Sherry had a string of boyfriends that would live with her and help her out with her bills.  She had dropped out of school at age sixteen because she wanted to have babies.  She met her husband then and had two babies, and he died some time after in an accident at Avondale Shipyard.  She got his pension for a long, long time, until I was in college.  She was basically harassed and followed around by the company until they gave up.  She couldn't afford a lawyer.  She didn't ask us for help then either, which I now find strange, given that my father had a lot of friends who practiced law.

She went to Charity Hospital for all of her medical care because she couldn't afford a doctor.  Much of the city used the ER as a clinic.  When I was out of college she disappeared for a few years, at least three.  We called her sister's house, who was on dialysis for a long time and wasn't the most coherent help, we called her home number, I wrote to her mom's address, and we didn't hear from her at all.  It turns out that she was so sick that she needed open heart surgery and went to live with her mother to have it and recover.  The doctors at Charity had told her for a long time that her blood pressure was high and when they discovered she needed surgery, she left town.

She didn't tell us or ask us for help, and I haven't pieced together why entirely.  The book gave me a little insight into it, but I still don't know.  Perhaps she felt that when she really needed us we wouldn't be there for her, or that we'd try to give her money and she didn't want it?  I don't know.  When I was in nursing school she'd ask me to check her blood pressure all the time, and I helped her figure out her medication, which half the time she couldn't pay for and got from Charity.  I really couldn't figure out why she'd just leave like that.

Most of that, though, is from my point of view.  The Help opened up a window into hers that I hadn't looked through before.