Black or White

I hope you remember Jacko's unforgettable song and its videoclip, which was a hit when I was about six, I think. Actually, it was the first time that I started to think about other nations because before that I thought every white man was Hungarian. Even the ones called Jack that I saw on TV spoke Hungarian, obviously beacuse films were dubbed. I highly recommend that you watch the clip, even though Jacko was a controversial figure and his operation and its background motivation raises several questions related to race, identity, and so on.

I finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett in about five days, some days reading 10+ hours. I was going around like some kind of zombie, not even looking up, totally immensed in the book. Even when I had to attend a meeting or a class I couldn't wait to get back to it. I got the book from one of my friends, who wants to remain unidentified, so let me thank her anonymously (I mean, of course it is her who remains anonymous).
According to the cover, what we get here is "the other side of Gone with the Wind," which is valid if we use it in a broader sense (though I've only seen that as a movie.) The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi, covering the years 1962 through 1964. As you may recognize, this was one of the hottest periods in U.S. history, especially in the field of racial issues. The Civil Rights Movement was at its highest, with marches, bus rides, and sit-ins all the way down the Mississippi. On the other hand, KKK was busy as well, organizing lynchings, arson, and homicide. In fact, Jackson, Mississippi was one of the most important sites and a recurring topic in federal news.
The book tells the story of an ambitious white girl, Miss Skeeter and a group of black domestic servants (help) who decide to write a book about the situation and daily life of black maids working for white families. Besides Skeeter, the most important characters are Aibileen and Minny, two of the maids. The chapters are told in first person singular, each by one of the three main characters, except for the chapter on the Benefit Eve, which is told from an outsider's perspective. I really liked this feature of the book and the author's strive for authentic voices. It is authentic in the sense that the author really grew up in Mississippi and her family had a black maid.
The book focuses on households and the relationship between maids and mistresses. The evildoer is called Hilly Holbrook, a completely appalling and hypocrite figure. She is the president of some lady league and all the other women follow her like sheep, and the whole atmosphere is pretty similar to The Stepford Wives (and here I'm referring to the movie with Nicole Kidman.) On the one hand, Hilly organizes charity balls to help "the starving children of Africa," while on the other hand her most important goal is to set up an initiative to make every household build a separate bathroom for the black servants, typically a small one outside the house. The most embarrassing thing is the way she creates an ideology for everything she does. In her initiative she claimes that not only do Blacks have bacteria that can infect white people because of their different bodily organisation, she also argues that white people might infect Blacks. Consequently, she expects Blacks to welcome her initiative as a dream come true.
What I appreciate in the book is that it tries to show different shades of the issue, just as there are different shades of black. We learn about love and hatred as well, it is both funny and sad, but above all it is about being human.
The movie is opening on November 3 in Hungary, so watch out.