Jade vanEyk

Mrs. Roskamp

LA, 8C

19 October 2016

The Help

I read the book The Help. It is a book about black maids who work for white families. The maids are mistreated very badly. This book shows how they feel about their work. They don’t all hate their employers. Some of the maids have worked for the same family for years and they are almost another member of the family. Other maids are seen as below them, one of the maid’s employers feels the need to build a whole separate bathroom because the family doesn’t want to share it. Some white people see the black people as dirty and bad. One white woman named Ms. Skeeter wants to have a career in writing. She talks to an editor in New York and says she will write a book about working in a white home from a maids perspective. She wants to interview a bunch of maids that work for her friends. The maids are hesitant to help because they know that if they are found out, they will lose their jobs, and any hope of getting a new one. Eventually their desire to let their stories be told overcomes their fear and they write the book. This book showed me that you cannot stereotype people based on their race or anything else about them. Through this book I learned that what other people think of you does not affect who you really are.

In this book there is always the underlying current of social difference between the maids and the white families. It is not ever spoken about, but everyone know it is there. Some people wanted to keep the races apart. They used Jim Crow Laws and segregation to achieve this. People said that if you were black, you were worse that if you were white. People, even if they didn’t believe in segregation, had this embedded in their brains. People were always telling you this. They would do subtle actions that showed that they thought they were different. Sometimes they wouldn’t even show that the maids were worse, just that they were different. Even though other people said that the maids were worse, most of them weren’t. They just had to work harder to have a good life.

Even though there is no slavery, the maids are under the control of their employers and there is nothing they can really do about it. The maids employers are all friends. If you are a maid, and you say or do something that is a little out of line you get fired. If you get fired, or if a white person is mad at you, they can easily spread lies about you and your work to their friends. If this happens, you won’t have a job. Even though the maids are technically free, if they want to support their family they are slaves. They are slaves to the people that they work for. Most of the people that they work for believe that they are better than the maids. People believed that because your skin was a different color, or because you were different, you were automatically worse. This is definitely not always true on both sides. There are some really nice white ladies, like Ms. Skeeter, and there are some not as nice maids. Even though people said that the white ladies would be better, they were not always. People also said the maids would always be bad, and they weren’t.

Through this book I learned that what other people think of you does not affect who you really are.  This book did a good job of showing how the maids did not always fit the description people gave them. Also the white families did not always fit the descriptions they were given. I really liked this book and it showed segregation really well. It told some of things that were not always told and it gave an interesting perspective. I really liked how it told things from different maids perspectives, and a white ladies perspective. This was a really good book and I would definitely read it again.