Novel explores beginnings of civil rights movement

Published 7:31 pm Friday, April 24, 2009

JACKSON, Miss. — Good thing Octavia Spencer is an actress. She needed all her stagecraft to hide a horrified look when her friend, Kathryn Stockett, asked her to read her new novel, “The Help.”

Stockett told Spencer she based a character on her.

“My face just got hot,” Spencer said, “and I thought, ‘What are you talking about?’”

It got worse. The character was a short, loud black maid who spoke in a Southern dialect and never seemed able to keep a job because of her big mouth, which didn’t go over well in the white neighborhoods of Jackson in the early 1960s.

“And I thought to myself, ‘If this is Mammy from ‘Gone With the Wind,’ I am just going to call her and tell her,’” she said. “I think by Page 3, I realized what she was doing, and I realized how intelligent these women were.

“Oh, honey, to me it’s an amazing journey.”

Reactions such as Spencer’s are becoming common as “The Help,” Stockett’s debut novel, creeps up the best-seller lists after an early February debut. The premise of the book usually causes an immediate visceral reaction, especially if readers know Stockett is white. After a few pages, though, most readers are hooked.

“It’s exciting to see someone get this kind of attention for a first novel,” said Stockett’s agent, Susan Ramer. “This is very rare.”

Not bad for a manuscript that was shunned as Stockett shopped it to agents. She stopped counting at 45 rejection letters, but kept at it until Ramer snapped it up after reading a few pages. What others didn’t see — or care to read — was immediately evident to Ramer.

“Reading it, you say, ‘I’ve got to have this,”’ Ramer said.

“The Help” tells the story of three women during the formative years of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, where it was dangerous to push the boundaries of segregation for both blacks and whites — though for very different reasons.

In a sense, it’s a story of the movement behind the civil rights movement. But it is much more. At turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, the story feels like a pitch-perfect rendering of a time when black people weren’t even second-class citizens in a state where anti-integration forces fought back with both restrictive laws and violence.

The 39-year-old Stockett was born in 1969, a few years after the novel’s events. Her family had a maid named Demetrie, who helped raise Stockett before Demetrie died in the mid-1980s. It wasn’t until much later that the author got a better understanding of the climate in which she grew up.

“I’m so embarrassed to admit this … it took me 20 years to really realize the irony of the situation that we would tell anybody, ‘Oh, she’s just like a part of our family,’ and that we loved the domestics that worked for our family so dearly, and yet they had to use the bathroom on the outside of the house.