My Experience With "The Help"

Over the last month, I have been in a lot of conversations on Facebook and in Hollywood (sometimes literally, in Hollywood) about the film, The Help.  I have read and heard all kinds of controversy about the film, but I am grateful to finally have been able to experience the film for myself.  I was especially grateful that the experience occured in Jonesboro, Arkansas. 

My wife's family reunion was in a community center in Jonesboro, which is the biggest town closest to her hometown.  The community center featured a small museum about Jonesboro's history.  I saw pictures of the graduating classes of the colored high school that stayed open until the late 60s, even though schools were desegregated over a decade earlier.  There was an exhibit dedicated to Debbye Turner, the pride and joy of Jonesboro, who was Miss America in 1990.  She competed in Arkansas for years without a state title and had to compete and Missouri to move on to the Miss America pageant.  I was told that her race probably contributed to that issue. 

I have been to Arkansas with her two other times, but I was never exposed to Arkansas's culture like I was on this trip.  My experience was taken to a new level when my mother-in-law, my wife and I went to see The Help.  As we were walking to the theater, my mother-in-law ran into two high school classmates who had just left the movie.

They spoke of how much the movie touched them, and the three of them reminisced about their childhoods in Arkansas.   The classmates were Caucasian, and they insisted upon the fact that they could not have afforded to have maids, but if they did, they would have never treated them the way the women did in the movie.  One woman spoke of how hers was the only white family on a block of African-Americans.  They remembered the whites only pool being shut down because black kids would throw things into it, out of protest.  The white classmates couldn't blame them for doing so.  They reflected on the separate, yet "equal" facilities.  As we walked into the movie, we giggled about how the classmates seemed to feel as if they needed to apologize on behalf of their race.  

A lot of the controversy I have heard about them film relates to how most of the team involved in its creation are Caucasian.  Regardless, I think it was a terrific film.  In my eyes, the color of the content creators did not affect the quality of the film and the truth in this story.  This film, and my weekend, shows how far we have come in this country. 

The huge theater was filled was filled with Caucasian people, and my mother-in-law said that the first time she went to see the film, it was filled with Caucasian people then.  Clearly, the book that the movie was based on had a major impact on the culture of the south, and it continues to do so.  Movies like this, is what inspired me to move out to Hollywood in the first place.