Kathryn Stockett’s The Help: A Memoir

Such reflections as these typically involve books first read in adolescence. Mine involve recollections of adolescence upon reading Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel The Help, mostly set (but alas not mostly filmed) where I grew up, far away and long ago in Jackson, Mississippi. I first read it on the Black Sea in 2010 with mixed feelings, because a neighbor in Kenilworth, England, where I have now lived for nearly fifty years, was discussing it soon with her book club and asked me to join her. Everyone including myself enjoyed the novel. I saw the film in 2012 on the White Sea—an appropriate balance.

One of the things I most admire about the novel is Stockett’s evocation of Belhaven Heights, where much of The Help is set. It is an area of high ground between the Pearl River and Town Creek—a leafy neighborhood of low hills, tree-lined streets, and houses dating from about a century ago on the downtown side and from the middle of the last century toward the north, including, of course, the campus of Belhaven College, and perhaps the campus of Millsaps College at 1701 North State Street. She is very accurate. I know exactly where I am on almost any page set in that part of town. Doubtless through my own inexperience, I am less at home in the novel out toward Miss Skeeter’s parents’ place north of Jackson and in the black neighborhood near the north-Jackson railway overpass bridge mentioned in the book and (I think) glimpsed in the film. The Woodrow Wilson Bridge was named for the president who insisted upon self-determination for ethnic groups in the former Hapsburg Empire in Europe but allowed racial segregation in Washington, D.C. It more or less overlooks the black neighborhood where Miss Skeeter fears taking her mother’s Cadillac.

Areas around Jackson and many of its neighborhoods other than Belhaven Heights have greatly changed in the past fifty years, with white populations in particular moving from west Jackson to north Jackson, pushing further north into Madison County and further east across the Pearl River from Hinds County into Rankin County around the Ross Barnett Reservoir. Rankin County was famous in Jackson for bootlegging when Mississippi still patchily retained prohibition; but, with the expansion of greater Jackson, it has become a dry middle-class county.

Downtown Jackson is also now very different. The old movie theaters are gone, as is virtually every shop of consequence; likewise the three largest downtown hotels have closed, notably the Robert E. Lee, site of significant parties in The Help. That hotel was converted years ago into a state office building. Kennington’s, the fashionable department store also mentioned by Stockett, has long since closed. In the 1970s I met Cordelia Kennington, a legendary local heiress, living in such a nursing home as the one to which Hilly banishes her mother in the novel. But in 2009 when The Help was published, Belhaven Heights—to which my parents, friends, and relatives from west Jackson moved in the 1960s—still looked very much as it had looked when my mother first took me there in the 1930s when she was crossing town to play bridge. That area includes the house on Council Circle where in 1937 the help prepared a treat for a bridge foursome by peeling away entirely the fruit of an avocado and serving the ladies each a quarter of the enormous seed. Bridge playing as a society game in Belhaven Heights in the 1960s is well observed in The Help.

The Help depicts events and attitudes in Mississippi the decade after my graduation from Millsaps College in 1952. But Stockett’s evocation of Belhaven Heights, which I knew well in my high school and college years and from many subsequent visits to Jackson, is so accurate that it is for me positively nostalgic. It captures much of what was misguided, disgraceful, ridiculous, unacceptable, and yet neighborly and wonderful about a city often misrepresented in other parts of America. Of course great changes were on the way, as I...