The Help Summary

The Help Summary

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Setting

The novel is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi,

Main Characters

Aibileen Clark – she is One of the novel’s three narrators who is a wise but reserved middle-aged black maid that takes pride in knowing that she has helped raise seventeen white children in her lifetime.

Minny Jackson – she is another narrator and protagonist. Minny Jackson is a wise-cracking mother of five who refuses to curb her outspoken personality even though it gets her into trouble with her white employers.

Eugenia "Skeeter” Phelan – is the third narrator and protagonist. Skeeter is a young white college graduate who comes from a wealthy Southern family.

Hilly Holbrook – she is the novel’s antagonist. Hilly is on the surface the ideal of the Southern housewife: loyal to her husband, adored by her friends and neighbors, and loving to her two children.

Celia Foote – she is the kind but clueless employer of Minny Jackson. Celia comes from a poor "white trash” background and does not know the conventions of how a white woman is "supposed” to treat her black maid

Elizabeth Leefolt – she Aibileen’s employer who is a neglectful and verbally abusive mother to Mae Mobley.

Mae Mobley Leefolt – she is the young daughter of Elizabeth Leefolt. Mae Mobley loves her maid, Aibileen, more than her actual mother.

Stuart Whitworth, Jr. – he is the son of a prominent segregationist senator; Stuart courts Skeeter throughout the novel.

Constantine Bates – she is Skeeter’s childhood maid, Constantine is like a second mother to her, providing love and compassion.

Charlotte Phelan – she is Skeeter’s mother who is an old-fashioned Southern woman that tries to persuade her daughter to conform to gender norms.

Yule May – she is Miss Hilly’s college-educated maid who steals a ring to pay for her twins’ college education.

Miss Walters – she is Hilly’s aging mother and Minny’s employer at the beginning of the novel. Miss Walters is a kind but senile woman who appreciates Minny’s outspoken personality.

Lulabelle Bates – she is Constantine’s pale-skinned daughter who returns to Jackson while Skeeter is away at college.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a luncheon at Leefolt’s house where the 23-year-old white women Hilly Holbrook and Eugenia "Skeeter” Phelan discuss Hilly’s initiative to pass a bill that would require every white household to have a separate bathroom for black housemaids. Disgusted by Hilly’s idea, Skeeter finds Aibileen and asks if she ever wished she could change things. Unwilling to express her true feelings to a white woman, Aibileen says that everything is fine.

A few days later, Minny Jackson, another black maid and Aibileen’s best friend, loses her job working for Hilly’s mother. Hilly has also spread rumors about Minny being a thief so none of the other neighbors will hire her. Minny tells Aibileen that she took revenge on Hilly, but she will not give her the details, only telling her that it involved a pie. Minny ultimately finds work with the white housewife Celia Foote, a woman none of the white housewives in the community befriends because she comes from a working-class background. Celia is kind to Minny and does not treat her any differently for being black.

Meanwhile, Skeeter gets a job writing an advice column about housekeeping for the Jackson Journal. Since she knows nothing about cleaning or cooking, she goes to her friend Elizabeth Leefolt’s house to ask Aibileen, her maid, some questions. While interviewing her, Skeeter learns that Aibileen’s recently deceased son had been writing a book on his experiences working for white men in Mississippi. Seeing firsthand how her friends treat their maids, Skeeter, who wants to be a writer herself, gets the idea to interview Aibileen about her experiences for a book about black domestic workers in the South.

At first, Aibileen declines to be interviewed for fear of losing her job or being targeted by white racists for publically criticizing white women. Aibileen changes her mind in order to help stop the racism that people like Miss Hilly are perpetuating in Jackson. Minny also tells her stories to Skeeter, but all the other maids in the community are too scared to talk. Skeeter also steals a book on the Jim Crow laws, which Hilly unluckily finds in her satchel. Thinking that Skeeter may be a secret integrationist, Hilly distances herself from her and tells the other women in the community to shun her.

Hilly’s maid, Yule May, steals a ring from Hilly so that she can afford to put her twins through college. Yule had originally asked Hilly for a loan before stealing the ring, but Hilly had refused. Despite the fact that Yule May was a loyal maid for so many years, Hilly uses her influence to have Yule thrown in jail overnight. Seething with anger at the injustice, the other maids agree to contribute their stories to Skeeter’s book.

When the book is nearly complete, Skeeter starts to worry that the maid’s pseudonyms will not be enough to stop the Jackson housewives from figuring out that the book is about them. Minny decides to tell Aibileen and Skeeter about what she did to Hilly as "protection.” As revenge for ruining her chances of finding work, Minny baked Hilly a pie with her own feces in it and fed it to her. When Hilly reads this story in the book, she will know for sure that the book is about Jackson, but she will also use her influence to steer people away from coming to the same conclusion about the setting so that she can protect herself from the humiliation of people finding out that she ate a black woman’s excrement pie.

When the book gets published, people in Jackson start to realize the book is about them, but Minny’s plan works and Hilly tries to convince them otherwise. Skeeter ends up accepting a job as an editorial assistant in New York and, after a tearful goodbye with Aibileen, picks up and goes. Hilly, however, still tries to take revenge on the maids. Figuring out that Aibileen must have had a role in the project, Hilly has Elizabeth fire her. Even so, Aibileen, who has taken over Skeeter’s job writing the housekeeping column for the Jackson Journal, leaves Miss Leefolt’s house feeling unburdened and free now that she has told the stories. The book ends with Aibileen feeling ready to write more about her life and experiences.

Themes

1. Racism. At its core, the novel is an exploration of the ways in which racism pervaded every aspect of social life in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. From Jim Crow laws that sanctioned discrimination and segregation as official policy to casual conversations between middle-class white women. In particular, the novel focuses on how white housewives justified the exploitation and emotional abuse of their black maids by convincing themselves that black people are fundamentally different from and inferior to white people.
2. Social Class. The novel offers an in-depth meditation on the complicated effects that class has on people’s social interactions, specifically with regard to race. It portrays class as providing the basis for Jackson’s tiered white society: the wealthy and "well-bred” are at the top, setting the social conventions and attitudes for everyone else below.