My earliest memory is sitting in a high chair at the family dinette, with my back to the kitchen, happily eating cut-up pieces of pancake. Behind me, my sturdy country grandmother from Alabama had fallen face-first to the linoleum with a spatula in her hand. Without missing a bite I said, "Granny fall down" as effortlessly as I might have said, "more please."
My mother's mother, Granny, had come to "help" my mom, who was ripe for popping out my little sister. On that particular morning Granny apparently had become light-headed, standing over the stove flipping flapjacks, and had fainted just behind my high chair. My sister was born 2 days later, probably arriving earlier than predicted because my mother could take just so much "help."
I am reminded of Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends. "And some kind of help is the kind of help that helping's all about. And some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without."
Granny certainly meant well. She had tried to provide the kind of help that helping's all about. In fact she probably had provided it, until she keeled over and suddenly became the kind of help that needed the kind of help that helping's all about. It wasn't her fault that things took an unwelcome turn. But it still left my mother, 40 weeks and counting, on bed rest with an additional patient in the next room. At that moment in time, I feel sure Mom would have categorized Granny's help as the kind of help she could do without, just then.
Which kind of help would The Help have fallen into?
If we're talking about Minny in the movie The Help, for which Octavia Spencer won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, then I believe we can safely say, both.
Minny was a surly sort of servant. The kind of help nobody wanted. She had a streak of nasty in her the width of a polecat's hind quarters. The white women in control of the town blackballed her even though she was certainly a capable employee, and even though they certainly had it coming. According to them, Minny's kind of help was the kind of help we all could do without. But as the Ghost of Christmas Present sagely noted in the Christmas classic "Scrooged," "Sometimes you have to slap them in the face just to get their attention."
And sometimes you have to bake'em a pie.
Ultimately, Minny's kind of help was what helping is really all about. Like bad medicine, sometimes help can taste like...well, it tastes real bad. But thank goodness Minny was the kind of help that didn't put up with...well, with what she served up. Her kind of help helped things change. Things needed to change. And her kind of help had the courage to insist on it.
I often call Janie Mitchell, Reliable Cook a prequel to The Help because the slaves of Janie's time, and Janie herself, were the original "help," ephemistically speaking.
Which kind of help would Janie Mitchell have fallen into? I believe we can safely say, neither.
Janie was definitely not the kind of help we all can do without, because she was clearly a valued employee. Her career with each family was one of longevity. She performed her duties to the very best of her ability. She cooked and cleaned and cared for her white families. She raised children and grandchildren. She counted her employers as her friends, her family. They were lucky to have her, I say.
But in Civil War Charleston, she was still a slave. And in post-Civil War Charleston, she was still the help. And that kind of help can never be confused with the kind of help that helping's all about.
Last weekend I spoke to a group of educators about Janie Mitchell, Reliable Cook in the hope that our book will become supplemental reading for Language Arts and History classes in middle and high schools. At our presentation half the room was black. I considered, only briefly, softening the presentation for the audience: leaving out the part where she thanks God for her days of slavery, for example. Janie tells an alternative slave story, and I often wonder if that is offensive to black people. Distasteful, as it were.
But the neatest thing happened. After the presentation one of the black women thanked me for presenting an alternative point of view to that time in southern history. She said, "You know, it wasn't all bad. And we need to hear that too."
Memories are what they are. There's no changing them, no getting them out of your head, no pensieve to retrieve a particular remembery and hand it off to someone else to experience the same sensory input, the same frame of reference, the same emotions that were available to the rememberer. Janie's memories, shared with us in her journal, are set in the framework of the social system of her time. We read her memories based on our framework, and logically find it egregious that things were as they were. Her memories are not ours, and ours are not hers.
In this time now, we have new memories, based on our shared history. Remembering that fact is the best way to help ourselves move forward.
