Reading, The Help, made me realize that I really don’t like reading about injustice. If I dwell on the way these black people were mistreated by white people I could get quite angry. So there were times when I found The Help a difficult book to read. About three quarters of the way through I jumped ahead and read the last chapter, I needed to know that it was going to end well (fortunately it did, while still being realistic).
One thing that I found particularly infuriating was that these white women wanted separate toilets built outside for their black maids/nannies because they believed them to be “diseased”. Yet they employed these maids/nannies to look after their children, bath them, change their nappies, and comfort them when distressed. For all intents and purposes they acted like their mothers while at the same time their white employers believed them to be “diseased”. It is just not logical that you would allow someone who you thought diseased such intimate access to your children. It is amazing how as human beings we can be so blind to our own inconsistencies.
