The Help: Chapter 1
Set in Mississippi in the early 1960′s, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett is told from three alternating viewpoints. One narrator is Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a progressive young college graduate from an upper middle-class, white family who dreams of becoming a writer. Another narrator is Aibileen, a middle-aged African American woman who has been a maid her whole life and who has raised no less than 17 white children in the process. The last narrator is Minny, another African American maid in her thirties. Minny is Aibileen’s best friend, despite the fact that the two women could not be more different. All three women narrate around the same event: the publishing of Skeeter’s novel about working for white women.
The story commences in August of 1962 in the kitchen of Elizabeth Leefolt. Aibileen is caring for Leefolt’s plump, two-year-old, Mae Mobley Leefolt, whom she calls Baby Girl. Aibileen's own son, Treelore, was killed months before she began working at the Leefolt residence. Treelore fell from a loading dock and was crushed under a tractor trailer. When the story opens it is the fourth Wednesday of the month, bridge club day, and Aibileen straightens up the house, manages Baby Girl, serves the women food, and overhears their conversation. The women discuss the upcoming Junior League Benefit, and Miss Hilly tells the women present, Elizabeth, Skeeter, and Hilly's mother, Miss Walter, about the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, a bill that requires a separate bathroom for blacks in every white house. During a break in the conversation, Skeeter finds Aibileen and questions her about Constantine, Skeeter's childhood maid, but Aibileen says she does not know anything. It is in this abrupt manner, that the first chapter