The mother of my first husband was a maid. Her oldest daughter was also a maid. The woman I take care of, Miss Pam, was also a maid. All three Black women were domestics in wealthy White households in St. Louis, MO. I don't know why cinema makes so much of the affection mytholiogically given between White children and Black domestics. None of these mythological babies attended the funeral of my ex-mother-in-law and they do not attend the sick rooms of my ex-sister-in-law or Miss Pam. These three women gave their love to their Black children they kindness and compassion to the White children they helped to raise.
America has its myths. There is a popular myth of Southern life as being completely populated by plantation mansions. This is a lie. There were very few slaveowners who prospered to the point of building great houses. Most of those who did had wives who brought wealth to the family (i.e.the wealth Martha Washington and Martha Whales Jefferson brought to their poor husbands) and the men had occupations other than their agrarian pursuits (many, if not most were solicitors, i.e. Jospeh Davis, elder brother of Jefferson Davis). Most slaves were bought on the margin. There were several big and small cotton crashes which forced enslaved Africans back on the auction block and White would-be and wannabe plantation owners back on the roads, staying with family, or into a poverty of self-sufficient farming.
I cannot comment on the movie, "The Help" because I haven't seen it. I see very few movies. I don't have the money, patience, or time. I will see it when I get a copy I can view at home.
It is unfortunate that the book was created without input from the subjects. If there is such a thing as method acting then we should also honour method writing. I would have liked the author to spend some time as a maid, with some maids (in a lateral position), or even using some plain old empathy for her subjects. As it stands, she has done the same thing that slave owners did and do - buy a person and turn them into a thing.
La Vonda R. Staples
Independent Historian
On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Tracy Flemming <cafenegritude@gmail.com> wrote:
Author Kathryn Stockett's letter is focal point in 'The Help' suit
3:08 PM, Aug. 23, 2011
The Associated Press
The Clarion-Ledger
A handwritten letter from author Kathryn Stockett has become the focal
point of a lawsuit over her bestselling novel "The Help," which has
been made into a box office hit.
A housekeeper who works for Stockett's brother claims her likeness was
used in the book without permission. "The Help" is based on
relationships between white families in Mississippi and the black
women who worked for them in the 1960s. The movie adaptation of "The
Help" took the No. 1 spot in theaters this past weekend with $20.5
million.
Hinds County, Miss., Circuit Court Judge Tomie Green dismissed Ablene
Cooper's lawsuit last week. Green said the statute of limitations
elapsed between the time that Stockett gave Cooper a copy of the book
in January 2009 and the lawsuit's filing in February of this year.
Cooper's lawyer, Edward Sanders, filed a motion last week to have the
lawsuit reinstated. The motion argues that the clock should not have
started ticking on the statute of limitations until Cooper read the
book in the summer of 2010. Sanders argued that Cooper didn't read it
sooner because Stockett said in the letter that, despite the
similarity in names, the character wasn't based on Cooper.
In a response filed with the court Monday, Stockett's lawyers said the
letter accompanied a copy of the book and Cooper waited too long to
sue under the one-year statute of limitations.
"The note makes clear that Ms. Stockett told Mrs. Cooper that a
character in the novel was named `Aibileen.' With note and novel in
her possession, Mrs. Cooper knew, or reasonably should have known, of
her potential claims in January 2009," Stockett's lawyers wrote in
court papers.
Stockett's defense team also said the letter has already been
discussed in court and the judge made the correct decision in throwing
out the lawsuit.
Sanders had no comment Tuesday.
The judge has not made any determination on whether Aibileen was based
on Cooper. Stockett denies she was.
In the letter, Stockett says she only met Cooper a few times, but was
thankful she worked for the writer's brother because his kids love
her.
"One of the main characters, and my favorite character, is an African
American child carer named Aibileen," the letter said. "Although the
spelling is different from yours, and the character was born in 1911,
I felt I needed to reach out and tell you that the character isn't
based on you in any way."
The letter goes on to say the book is "purely fiction" and inspired by
Stockett's relationship with "Demetrie, who looked after us and we
loved dearly." The letter is referring to Demetrie McLorn, the
Stockett family's housekeeper, who died when the author was a
teenager.
An affidavit said Cooper knows Stockett, has kept her child before,
and had no reason not to trust her.
"She's a liar," Cooper screamed outside the courthouse after the
lawsuit was dismissed last week. "She did it. She knows she did it."
The lawsuit also quotes passages from the book, including one in which
Aibileen's character describes a cockroach: "He black. Blacker than
me."
The lawsuit says Cooper found it upsetting and offensive to be
portrayed as someone "who uses this kind of language and compares her
skin color to a cockroach."
Stockett's publicist has declined comment on the lawsuit.
http://www.clarionledger.com/comments/article/20110823/NEWS/110823014/Author-Kathryn-Stockett-s-letter-focal-point-Help-suit
On Aug 29, 9:45 am, Toyin Falola <toyin.fal...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> Dangerous White Stereotypes
>
> August 28, 2011, New York Times
>
> By PATRICIA A. TURNER
> Davis, Calif.
> ONE of the most noteworthy movies of the summer is "The Help." Set in
> Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, it focuses on the relationships
> between white upper-middle-class women and the black domestics who
> took care of them and their children. Although many reviews of the
> film were quite positive, numerous critics, including some
> African-American commentators, have lashed out against it, arguing
> that the film does not deserve the accolades it has received.
> To some extent, they have been angry that the movie is based on a
> novel by a white woman, Kathryn Stockett, and they question whether
> she is capable of telling that particular story. Some have also
> complained that the movie reinforces stereotypes about black Southern
> households. The black heroines speak with a dialect that disturbs
> some viewers; the audience never sees an intact black household, and
> a black man's abuse of his wife is all the more chilling because we
> never see him, only the pots he hurls and the scars he leaves.
> One maid's close bond with the white toddler she cares for has been
> decried as a re-enactment of the misconception that maids nurtured
> their white charges while denigrating their own black offspring.
> Not all blacks are unmoved by "The Help." Indeed, among my friends,
> relatives and colleagues a wide range of views have been shared,
> including comments that some of us might want to establish a support
> group for strong black women who liked "The Help."
> It is unfair to the filmmakers and cast to expect a work of fiction
> to adhere to the standards of authenticity we would want for a
> documentary. But we also recognize that precious few works of art
> tackle the Civil Rights era, and what people coming of age in the
> 21st century learn about this era often stems from fictive rather
> than nonfictive sources.
> Forty-eight years after Martin Luther King Jr. was accompanied by
> tens of thousands of black domestic workers to the National Mall in
> Washington to demand economic justice, it is not all that difficult
> to render black fictional characters with appealing attributes and
> praiseworthy talents. What is more difficult to accomplish is a
> verisimilar rendering of the white characters.
> This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception,
> the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of
> their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television
> shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and
> their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people,
> therefore they are racists.
> There's a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad
> people were racist implies that good people were not.
> Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it
> was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and
> personalities we would applaud. It's the fallacy of "To Kill a
> Mockingbird," a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a
> troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites
> were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a
> social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and
> that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to
> these struggling individuals.
> But that wasn't the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking
> man's Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people
> whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way
> popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good
> people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated
> in Hitler's cause.
> Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other
> bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor
> whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as
> unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. "The Help" tells a
> compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.
> I have dim recollections of watching Dr. King in 1963, with the black
> maid who raised me - my mother. If my father wasn't in the room, he
> was working to make sure there would be opportunities in my future. I
> have benefited enormously from their hard work and from the shift
> that American culture has undergone as the scaffolding of
> discrimination was dismantled.
> My parents, and the countless other black Americans who not only
> endured but thrived within the limited occupational sphere granted
> them, would have been proud of what has been accomplished since 1963,
> but they would not have wanted us to whitewash that earlier world.
> Patricia A. Turner is a professor of African American studies and the
> vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of
> California, Davis. Her most recent book is "Crafted Lives: Stories
> and Studies of African American Quilters."
>
> --
> Toyin Falola
> Department of History
> The University of Texas at Austin
> 1 University Station
> Austin, TX 78712-0220
> USA
> 512 475 7224
> 512 475 7222 (fax)http://www.toyinfalola.com/www.utexas.edu/conferences/africahttp://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairshttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
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La Vonda R. Staples
Adjunct Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Community College of the District of Columbia
314-570-6483
"It is the duty of all who have been fortunate to receive an education to assist others in the same pursuit."
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