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  • Writing The Help:The Oblique and Not-So-Oblique Narratives of Eudora Welty, Ellen Douglas, Norma Watkins, and Kathryn Stockett
  • Mae Miller Claxton

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—”

—Emily Dickinson

Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 book The Help and the 2011 film version unleashed a fire storm of controversy in the popular media and to a lesser extent in the fields of southern and African-American academic studies. In the national media, debates raged in Essence magazine and on National Public Radio. In a roundtable entitled “Placing The Help in Social, Political, and Literary History” at the 2012 Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference in Nashville, scholars argued over the merits and failings of novel and film.1 For better or worse, The Help brought to our national consciousness in a post-civil rights era the complexities of a white southern woman writing about the difficult relationships between African-American servants and their white employers, relationships examined by writers such as Fanny Kemble and Mary Chesnut in the nineteenth century. Setting Stockett’s The Help into the context of other writings by white southern women offers invaluable insight into the issues the novel examines. In this essay, I consider how four white Mississippi women write about “the help” in their works. Eudora Welty’s short story “Kin” emphasizes family history in these relationships, while “June Recital” explores issues of gender connected to race. Ellen Douglas considers how to write about these relationships in Can’t Quit You, Baby, and Norma Watkins discusses her own experiences with “the help” in her memoir The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure. Such an examination provides an opportunity to look closely at issues of race and gender in a segregated society that claimed to value these relationships (these servants were “part of the family”) and yet created a power dynamic resulting in violence and abuse for African Americans.

Welty is perhaps Mississippi’s best-known female southern writer, but she has often been criticized for not writing more openly about the racial issues [End Page 145] of her time and place. In fact, Welty, although born in Jackson, grew up with an outsider’s perspective. She notes the Ohio and West Virginia backgrounds of her parents in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings and explains in an interview that her father was a “Yankee and a Republican” and her mother a “Southerner and a Democrat” (“Eudora Welty” 321). Regarding her mother’s family, she explained, “I think something to do with the Civil War and anti-slavery was why they moved to West Virginia. They set their slaves free—at least on one side” (321). Unlike many children in middle-class families in Jackson, Welty did not grow up with African-American servants. In another interview, she stated that as a child she really didn’t know very many African Americans in segregated Jackson “except in a white household as a servant or something” (“Fiction as Event” 14). After completing a liberal arts degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1929 and living in New York City in 1930–1931, Welty came home to a society constructed with policies increasingly based on racism (Marrs, Eudora 23, 25).

Welty’s portrayal of African-American characters such as Phoenix in “A Worn Path,” Little Lee Roy in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and Livvie in “Livvie” displays her ability to draw fully realized, complex African-American characters and supply the segregated, racist historical and societal context that informed every aspect of their lives. Given the large numbers of African-American women who worked as domestics in Mississippi, perhaps it is significant that Welty does not write very often about “the help,” choosing more often to give African-American characters agency in her stories rather than forcing them into supporting roles. For the purpose of supplying context for Stockett’s The Help, however, I look at two minor characters, Rachel in Welty’s story “Kin,” published in 1952 in the New Yorker and included in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955), and Louella in “June Recital,” published in 1947 and included in Welty’s 1949 collection The Golden Apples.

“Kin...

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