The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection

The Carolina Rice Kitchen:  the African Connection is perhaps the most erudite cookbook I've ever read, excepting maybe The Oxford Companion to Food.  And, it's a cookbook within a cookbook, or rather, a cookbook within a treatise on a specific cuisine:  the Carolina rice kitchen.

Karen Hess has reproduced within her own book an early 20th century cookbook called The Carolina Rice Cookbook, by a Mrs. Samuel Stoney. It seems that Mrs. Sam Stoney's husband was one of my grandfather's cousins in South Carolina, where a lot of rice was grown in the 19th century.  This was no ordinary rice;   it was a special variety called Carolina Gold.  Planters stopped growing Carolina Gold in South Carolina in the 20th century, because it was so labor-intensive, and the soft ground where it was grown was not suitable for machine cultivation.

But in the 19th century, particularly during slavery times, South Carolina grew a lot of rice and had a true cuisine built around rice.  The European-American planters did not come from a rice-growing culture, however.  Their slaves did.  This is the other story behind the Carolina Rice Cookbook that Karen Hess uncovers.

She says that white planters learned everything they needed to know about rice culture and cookery from their African slaves.  West Africa had a thriving rice agriculture for centuries before West Africans were enslaved in large numbers and brought to the United States to grow rice.  In fact, planters especially wanted slaves from the rice-growing areas of West Africa.

It wasn't just that Africans knew how to grow rice:  they also had special ways of cooking it.  Hess says that in South Carolina, people cook rice differently from the way they do it in the rest of the country:  they do it the African way, which is also the Indian (Asian Indian) way.  In Africa and India, people don't boil two cups of water for every cup of rice, and then cook the rice in that water until the rice is absorbed; rather, they boil the rice in a lot of water--perhaps three times the amount of rice--for about 12-15 minutes, then strain the rice and put it back in the pot to "soak" or steam.  The pot is put near the fire, in a warm place, or over low heat.  This way of cooking yields a very fluffy rice, "with every grain distinct," which was apparently desirable.  (The Chinese/Japanese way of cooking rice uses less fuel, however, because less water has to be boiled.)  I have been cooking Carolina Gold rice this way since I read the book, and I like the result.  (You can buy Carolina Gold at Whole Foods and other stores, because some enterprising foodie growers are now growing it again, but it's expensive.)

Another characteristic cooking method in the Carolinas was the pilau.  This was rice simmered in a stock made from chicken or meat.  In this case, the rice stays in the cooking liquid rather than being drained.  The pilau, and jambalaya, according to Hess, came to the Carolinas from Persia by way of Provence.  Many of the Europeans who settled the Carolinas were Huguenots from that part of France.

Hess does a lot of her detective work by way of etymologies.  One of her most interesting speculations is about the dish Hoppin' John and its origins.  Hoppin John is rice cooked with some kind of beans.  In the South the bean is usually black-eyed peas, or some other pea in the cowpea family.  But Hess thinks the word just means "beans with rice."  The word for beans in Malay is kachang.  And the Persian word for rice is bahatta.  If you say "bahatta kachang" fast, it sounds sort of like Hoppin' John, at least if you are a Gullah speaker, as the African-Americans of coastal South Carolina were.  Works for me.

Another interesting etymological speculation in the book revolves around one of my favorite foods, the beignets of New Orleans.  Rice was not as central to the cuisine of New Orleans as it was to the cuisine of coastal South Carolina.  But by the late 19th century, African-American women were selling something called "calas" on the streets, as a street food sold by street vendors. These were fritters made with rice flour, or beignets de riz.  How did they get the name calas?  Hess speculates that African-Americans saw them as a variation on their African akkra, or fried croquettes, usually made of ground blackeyed peas in Africa.  As with Hoppin' John, some consonants got changed and transposed:  akkra became akla, and, Hess says, "cala is a metathetic form of akla, a...common alteration involving transposition."  (I learned from wikipedia that "metathesis" is just the rearranging of the sounds in a word, as for example saying "purty" instead of "pretty.")

Anyway, those wonderful beignets at the Cafe du Monde are French, yes, but they're also African, and they used to be made with some rice flour, or cooked rice mixed with flour.

There are also chapters on rice soups and other rice breads besides the calas, and sweet rice puddings for desserts.  South Carolinians also ate the birds that ate their rice:  Dolichonyx oryzivorus,  Here is a charming recipe from the frontispiece of the Carolina Rice Cook Book:

    "Select the fattest birds, remove the entrails, bake them whole or split them up the back and broil.
Permit no sacrilegious hand to remove the head, for the base of the brain of the rice bird is the most succulent portion. Use no fork in eating.  Take the neck of the bird in the left hand and his little right leg in the right hand. Tear away the right leg and eat all but the extreme end of the bone. Hold the bill of the bird in one hand and crush your teeth through the back of the head, and thank Providence that you are permitted to live.  Take the remaining left leg in your right hand and place in your mouth the entire body of the bird, and then munch the sweetest morsel that ever brought gustatory delight.  All that remains is the front portion of the head and the tiny bits of bone that formed the ends of the legs.  To leave more is to betray your unappreciativeness of the gifts of the gods."

Wonder if you can buy whole rice birds at Whole Foods?

Gaia's gonna get you

James Lovelock is the scientist who first conceptualized the Earth as a living organism. And he named that organism Gaia.  His idea was that life on Earth keeps Earth hospitable to life, generally.  But sadly, as he points out in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, the Earth goddess Gaia does not necessarily care if one species in particular--ours--survives or disappears. She may have to regulate herself by getting rid of us.

Lovelock sees the Earth as an old lady, as old as himself in fact.   He is in his late eighties, and if life on Earth is 3.5 billion years old, and Gaia will die when the sun burns out in 500 million years, then she's about 88% of the way there.  If a man like Lovelock can live to be 100, and Gaia's "100" is 4 billion, then she's an old lady indeed.

But she is not a loving mother; she is more like the old Hindu goddess Kali who destroys as well as creates.  Lovelock thinks that the chances are good that humans may not survive the coming catastrophe of climate change.  But if it's any consolation, he thinks that life on Earth will survive, and new organisms will evolve to live in its new hot state.  He hopes that humankind will be able to evolve its consciousness to a different one, less predatory and selfish, and more concerned with life on the planet as a whole than simply with individual or species survival.  And if not evolve, then adapt to life on a hotter planet.

Lovelock makes a good case for the fact that the conventional predictions of the pace of warming may be grossly understated.  He shows how global sea level changes are a more accurate way of measuring the amount of heat that the Earth has already absorbed, and by that measure, we are further down the path of climate change than many realize or predicted.  Also, the Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than scientists have predicted. Lovelock emphasizes that when it comes to climate change, change is not linear, but can be quite abrupt and chaotic before the Earth levels out into a new steady, hotter state.

Although Lovelock addresses "solutions" like solar and wind power, he does not see them as real solutions.  In his view, it's all too little, too late. There are too many of us, and solar and wind can't possibly supply enough power for seven billion humans, even if they are willing to make do with less (although he certainly advises us to get ready to make do with less).  He has famously touted nuclear power as a solution, but it's hard to see how this squares with his reverence for Gaia herself.  Putting toxins into her system that will persist for millennia hardly seems like a nice thing to do to an old lady who's already having hot flashes.

Indeed Lovelock is a cranky old guy who for some reason seems to dislike environmentalists.  The chapter "To be or Not Be Green" is a confusing diatribe against the "new breed" of environmentalists who have the gall to be more than just  innocent nature lovers who enjoy a walk in the country from time to time; on the contrary, these new bad environmentalists are political lefties, "partisan and contentious."  You would think that, faced with the extinction of humankind, environmentalists would be praised for going to the ramparts.  But Lovelock longs for the old days when nobody knew that big corporations were injecting poisons not just into birds, but into humans also.  This chapter is odd because in it, Lovelock talks about the near disaster involving CFCs destroying the Earth's ozone layer.  Lovelock apparently had invented a tool that made the measurement of tiny amounts of pollutants possible, and this  tool made the detection of the ozone hole possible.  He seems to be glad this disaster was averted, so why does he resent the politicization of environmental issues so much?  It's not clear.

Another odd thing is the way he seems to see humankind's fouling of its own nest as somehow inevitable, given the way our species evolved. He quotes E. O. Wilson as placing the blame on the fact that we are "tribal carnivores."  Well, maybe some of us are.  But everything was going pretty well until some white male Europeans invented the Industrial Revolution.  At the time, the Romantics knew this was a bad idea, people like William Blake, Ruskin, and William Morris.  But people made fun of the Romantics much as Lovelock mocks environmentalists.  And look what happened.  The fact is that this disaster is the making of a few people, mostly male and mostly European. 

I guess you could go back further and say that everything was going pretty well until these same male Europeans invented patriarchy, war, city states, and slavery. That's the real beginning. But however bad life under patriarchy was, life was still possible. It wasn't until patriarchy and capitalism came up with the internal combustion engine and started burning coal in large quantities that the fate of the human race was sealed.

I hope that Lovelock and Wilson are right, though, in their implication that if we become less carnivorous and less tribal, we might survive. I dream a world of matrilineal vegetarians.  And Gaia, or Kali Ma, or whoever she is, might like us enough to let us survive.

Fantastic Mr Fox

There's a new movie out called Fantastic Mr Fox, based on the book by the same name, by Roald Dahl.  Dahl is one of my favorite writers for children:  I love Matilda and James and the Giant Peach especially.  There's also a great book of "fractured fairy tales" in verse, Revolting Rhymes, that I've practically memorized.

So when I heard that somebody had made a stop-motion animated version of Fantastic Mr. Fox, I had to go see it.  In the book, the fox lives under a tree, and he regularly robs three farmers of their chickens, ducks, and cider.  The farmers try to dig him out, and to escape, he and his family tunnel all the way under the farms and into the chicken houses, etc, where they get food for a huge underground feast with the other animals of the wood.  In my book, there are hilarious drawings by Quentin Blake, who has illustrated many of Dahl's books.  And Dahl's somewhat gross sense of humor are evident:  he describes things falling out of Farmer Bean's ears, such as flies and bits of gum.

The original story is in the tradition of so much English children's literature:  talking animals that wear clothes and live bourgeois lives in holes under trees, like in The Wind in the Willows or Winne the Pooh or the Beatrix Potter books; and marginalized "people" like the Borrowers who are invisible to the humans but rob them of small things that the people can easily spare, just to survive.  Why did English writers specialize in these sorts of stories?  Maybe because of the tradition of "fairy" stories:  the fairies, after all, were small, not-quite-human beings that lived on the edges of gardens, invisible to the powerful humans. Some say that the fairy folk were the original inhabitants of England before the Celts arrived.


 Wes Anderson, who made the film, has elaborated greatly on this tradition  and updated it.  All the twee elements of British children's fiction are retained: the precious miniature interiors and clothes, the bucolic countryside, the bourgois comforts of life in a hobbit or badger hole.  Anderson commissioned people to make tiny knitted caps for the puppets to wear, for example, and it's a  great pleasure to look at all these details.  Much work went into this movie, into the making of the sets and into the laborious process of stop-motion animation, where each tiny movement of a character is photographed, then the puppet is moved a little more and another photograph is taken, and so on. It's an old-fashioned way of making an animated movie.


But in addition to all this cuteness, there's a kind of darkness in the movie's set and  plot that's only hinted at in Dahl's book.  Anderson brings this dark element to the fore.  Dahl's farmers are obsessed, Ahab-like, with eliminating the fox; but in the movie they go beyond bulldozers and use explosives to oust the foxes from their hole. I'm sorry to say that it reminded me of our country's behavior at the beginning of the Iraq war, when we bombed civilians in Baghdad during Shock and Awe.  And the animals cowering in the hole are nothing if not  civilians in war time--mothers and children along with the fathers--banding together courageously to survive.


The farms in the movie are factory farms.  They are surrounded by concertina wire and guarded by armed guards. Bean surveys his realm through the use of video cameras, from an underground bunker.  The farms look more like prisons or concentration camps than like bucolic English countryside farms of Beatrix Potter's time.  And indeed, real livestock farms are very much like concentration camps these days.  And when the animals finally find a paradise full of food in the movie, it's the inside of a big box supermarket at night, where they drink juice out of boxes and eat fruit with stickers on them.  Mr Fox points out that the food may not seem like real food, but the animals are surviving, and that's the name of the game:  survival.  A sentiment that many Americans can relate to this winter as they push their buggies through the aisles of Costco or Walmart.


Indeed there's an existential theme that persists throughout the movie:  What is a fox?  Mr Fox asks this question aloud and points out that it is existential.  Can a fox be a fox if he never steals a chicken?  If he no longer acts like a wild animal?  He longs to BE a wild animal, rather than the bourgois, tamed fox journalist he has become in the movie.  All those old children's books implicitly asked the same question:  if animals are like people--wearing clothes and talking--are people like animals?  And often, in those books, the humans were much more cruel and bloodthirsty than the animals.  This is true in the movie as well.  Again, many  humans may have repressed the question that haunts Mr Fox:  is a thoroughly tamed and domesticated human, pushing a cart through Costco, still "wild" and therefore "free"?  What have we lost, in order to survive as modern humans?

Through all this seriousness, though, there's a lot of humor. The animals sometimes lapse into fierce fights, with growling and scratching, but they never say bad words:  whenever they're tempted, they substitute the word "cuss," as in "Are you cussing with me?"  or "That was one giant cluster cuss."  They also eat ferociously, with their hands, like real animals.  These sudden lapses into "animality" are funny, juxtaposed with all the gentility of their rooms and clothing.  Also, there's a very funny scene where a young fox is learning a game called Whack Bat, the rules of which are so arcane and elaborate that the explanation of how it works is a parody of every over-elaborate sport you've ever tried to learn.  (It also reminds you of the invented game quidditch in the Harry Potter stories.)

I also loved the music.  The first song you hear is that great song, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett."  Mr Fox is playing it on a little tape recorder attached to his belt, it turns out.  How quaint!  (Alongside all the other 19th century"quaintness" of the English children's book, but quaint in its evocation of the fifties, when Davy Crockett was all the rage, and of the seventies, when we listened to music on little tape players.)  Anderson said in an interview that the fox's tail (which he loses near the beginning of the book) reminded him of Davy Crockett's coonskin hat.  Also the soundtrack includes several Burl Ives songs from the fifties, songs I loved as a child, such as "Buckeye Jim," and "The Grey Goose."  The latter is a song about a hunt, so it's appropriate.  The little fox child is listening to the song in his room as he falls asleep.

About the loss of the tail:  in the book the tail gets shot off by the farmers, and Mr Fox retreats to his hole, where Mrs Fox "tenderly" licks its stump to stop the bleeding.  I suppose this was too erotic and animal-like for the movie, so in the movie  she just sews up the stump instead!  So, despite the daringness and contemporaneity of the movie, the book still has an edginess and naughtiness that the movie can only aspire to.  That's the thing about books.

Story Corps in Houston

The Story Corps mobile booth is in Houston for a month, until Dec 19.  Today I went with my Peruvian friend Vilma Burwick to the Story Corps booth to record an interview with her about her very interesting life.

Vilma was born in a remote village in the north of Peru.  She had a large family, and they were very close. She really did walk two hours to school every morning, and two hours back.  When she went to high school, it was three hours.  Her father really valued education, and he encouraged her to study.

When she finished high school, she went to Lima to go to the university there.  She worked to support herself while she was in the university, and she became a lab technician at a hospital.  But she wanted more opportunity, and she decided she wanted to move to the United States at some time, but she didn't know how she could make it happen.

Vilma cared for the children of a family that sometimes traveled to the United States for vacations.  On one of these trips, Vilma had a long layover in the Houston airport.  A mysterious man kept talking to her and flirting with her.  She was scared, but after a while she came to sort of like the man. When she got back to Peru, he had sent her a lot of emails!  They were in English, but she got a dictionary and translated them.  She wrote back to him, partly in Spanish, and he had a dictionary too, to figure out what her emails meant. Fifteen months after she met Keith Burwick in the Houston airport, she came to Houston and, reader, she married him.

Vilma had to learn English, so she watched American soap operas and read as much as she could in English. She started attending ESL classes at HCC, which is where I met her.  Now she's on her way to a four-year university, to study microbiology.  And she became an American citizen. She's an American success story.

Multiculturalism and Feminism

An interesting issue came up in the writing center the other day.  I was tutoring a Chinese woman who was writing an essay about motherhood, fatherhood, and marriage. She wrote that women have a "bounden duty" to have children because they have the right body parts.

Usually I don't argue with students when they say things that I don't agree with, but I couldn't let this one go by.  In part that was because I knew that her writing teacher would think this point of view odd; the teacher had assigned a lot of essays about gender issues and is presumably a feminist, although I don't know her and couldn't say that for sure.  Even if this were not the case, I thought it was my "bounden duty" to inform the student that this statement, presented as if it were self-evident and not defended at all, would strike most Americans as old-fashioned, if not downright offensive.  So I told her that in the US, we consider child-bearing a choice rather than a duty.

"A choice?"  she said, after a long silence. What a novel concept.

I was somewhat puzzled by her puzzlement, because I have met other young Chinese women students who are very career-oriented and don't want to be only housewives.  They don't seem to see child-bearing as a "duty," and I know that China has had a long-time policy of limiting births to one child per family.  The Maoist socialist revolution was ostensibly feminist also.

I asked the student if most people in China thought that women had a duty to have children. She said that they did.  Maybe she is from a different class or region than the women I had met before, who were graduate students at the University of Houston.

Anyway I posted a story about this on the email list for writing tutors at HCC, asking people what they do when a student writes something that is "politically incorrect" or possibly offensive to most Americans, especially when they don't seem to realize this is the case.  Almost always these un-PC statements are about the inferiority of women, or their proper place in society being firmly under the thumb of men.  Muslim and Hispanic male students, and some Asian men, are the usual offenders, but occasionally recent immigrants who are women express these un-feminist points of view, without defending them much, as if they are obviously true.

I was surprised that another tutor thought that it was inappropriate to some degree for me to argue with the Chinese student about her point of view. She said that some people think it is an honor to be pregnant, and that I was privileging the intellect over the body.  I wrote back that I thought being pregnant and giving birth were indeed very empowering, but that the body is not necessarily "honored" by pregnancy:  that in fact pregnancy changes the body in sometimes negative ways that can last the rest of a woman's life. (That's something that they don't tell young women.)  I also reiterated the familiar feminist point that honoring the body means giving its owner control over it, rather than assuming that its reproductive ability belongs to a husband, or a collective.  Women are not just baby-making machines, yo. 

I also said that when one becomes a mother, one is by no means giving up on the intellect:  being a good mother takes a lot of thought.


But there's another issue here: what are we to do with all these people moving to  our shores who bring with them pre-Enlightenment--ie medieval--ways of thinking?  Some European countries have had the policy of absolute tolerance of, say, Islamic fundamentalism, and the result is incidents like the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.  Other countries like France have tried to assimilate Muslims by forbidding Muslim girls from wearing head scarves at school.  In the US, we haven't really decided what our policy is. Muslim girls can wear head scarves or even full body coverings to school (I've seen women on the Rice campus who are covered head to toe in black, to the point that you can't even see their eyes), and in most universities and colleges, faculty bend over backward to accommodate "multicultural" points of view, in order to be "post-colonial."   At the same time most academics would probably describe themselves as feminists, even while they argue that it's parochial for Westerners to tout Enlightenment values like freedom of thought and individualism! 

I just can't go there.  I am unashamed about valuing freedom of thought and individualism.  And I don't think that those values are at war with community well-being.  We don't have to choose between the individual and the community, especially when it comes to women's individualism:  development policy makers in the Third World know now that educating and empowering women is the single most important thing that an NGO can work on, to improve the overall well-being of a whole community.  (See Nicholas Kristof  and Sheryl WuDunn's new book Half the Sky.)

Also, if the Chinese people are so averse to individualism, why do they want to get rid of the firewall that their government has erected around their internet access?  How could Tiananmen Square have happened?  Some Western intellectuals seem to think that all political attitudes are created by one's society, and that they are all equally valid; but if that's the case, how does change ever happen?  How do people come to question what they've been taught?  I think that people know when things aren't right, and that individual thinking exposes oppression.  The freedom to talk about one's insights into oppression helps other individuals think more clearly about their situation, and that's how political change in the right direction of more freedom and equality happens.

So I will continue to encourage thinking and questioning of received opinion in the writing center.  I don't care if I'm not post-colonial enough.  I like the Enlightenment.

Why Not Play it Cool?

Here's a poem by Wendell Berry that recently appeared in The New Yorker.  It's written in couplets of iambic pentameter, and it's about global warming, I think.  

Can you write a good poem about global warming?  This poem doesn't shy away from being didactic. In fact, you could call it preachy. Usually that makes for a bad poem.  And I am having a hard time saying that this is a good poem, even though I agree with all its sentiments.  A couple of lines in it stick in my craw, for example:

 "Burning the world to live in it is wrong." 

 Why is this bad?  Well, any more, poems don't generally lecture to you and tell you what's wrong.  I guess they used to, though, but that ended sometime in the early twentieth century.

 So let's say this poem is a throw-back to ...Victorian poetry.  Is it good Victorian poetry?  I would say:  pretty good.  If we look at the line above again, there's more to it than first appears:  the image is of burning  a world in order to live in it.   How can you burn something and live in it at the same time.  You can't.  You could burn some of it to live in the rest of it, but that's not what it says:  it says we are burning the whole world in order to live in it.  Our house is burning down around us.  Point taken.

Some of the images  are really good:  "an antique dark-held luster."  That's oil and coal  presumably.  It's old--"antique," implying old-fashioned, even out-moded, but valuable--and it's "dark-held," in some fastnesses deep in the earth.  Maybe the earth tries to hold onto it, but we wrest it away from her.  And it has luster; it shines like gold, like money, which it can be exchanged for a lot of.

But the question remains:  is it ok to write a didactic poem?  In the sixties there were a lot of poem-like songs that were sort of didactic.  We called them "protest songs."  Is this a protest poem? 

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

(With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe)

by Wendell Berry

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Another mule and wagon on the Dixie Limited's track

Probably by now you've heard of Kathryn Stockett's widely acclaimed first novel, The Help.  A friend loaned it to me, and I started reading it somewhat skeptically, as I usually don't like "best-seller" chick lit.  But this book surprised me:  it was well-written and thoughtful, and it has a riveting plot that keeps the reader reading deep into the night.

There are already over a thousand reviews of this book on Amazon, and I haven't read very many of them, so I may be repeating what other people have said, but here goes.  The story is told in the first person voices of three characters:  Skeeter, the young white woman who co-writes a book about the lives of black maids in Jackson, MS, in the mid-1960s; Aibileen, a maid in Jackson who writes several of the most important chapters in the book; and Minny, another maid whose explosive narrative of her own experiences being a maid drives the plot of the book.  In the background are the terrible events of the early years of the Civil Rights movement:  bombings, shootings, assassination, and general terror, mixed with wild hope.

I was raised in the South, and my mother had a maid.  She was a constant quiet presence in my life from the time I was four, until I left for college.  She left after my sister graduated from college and got married, so that means she worked for my family from about 1959 to 1999, about forty years.  She was a very young woman, around eighteen years of age, when she first started coming a few days a week to our apartment at the VA hospital, and she was a little older than I am now when she finally left.

I remember wondering a lot what her life was like when she wasn't at our house.  I  never saw her house, or met anybody in her family. Sometimes I heard her husband's voice on the phone.  During the 1960s, I remember knowing on some level that there was a lot of tension between black and white people (I was 14 in 1968), and I wished I could know what she thought, but as Kathryn Stockett says in the epilogue to her book, it just didn't seem possible to ask.  Ms. Stockett wrote her book after spending years imagining how her beloved Demetrie would have answered that question.

This book may be as good an answer as white women ever get to the question:  what do the black women that work for our families think about us?  What are their lives like when they're not with us?  Some of the answer, of course, is not flattering to white folks and is uncomfortable to read about.  But Stockett also recognizes the closeness that sometimes develops between black and white women who spend hours together, looking after children together, and sharing the ups and downs of life over many decades; some of these relationships do last for forty years or more.  The closeness and affection and genuine caring are there, but the characters in the novel talk about the "line" that can't be crossed, and how frustrating that line is.

I have to say that despite all the changes of the last forty years, that line has not gone away. I feel it when I am with the caregivers that take care of my parents so devotedly, twenty-four hours a day.  I like to think that we are friends, and that there is genuine respect both ways.  But my life has been privileged in ways that they can scarcely even imagine.  Perhaps the greatest privilege was the opportunity to stay home with my own child, instead of having to leave him to care for other people's children.

The most heart-rending story in the book focuses on this very issue:  the separation of a black mother and daughter, when the mother can't possibly care for her daughter and decides to put her in an orphanage.  The main white character, Skeeter, only hears of her mother's maid's heartbreak at losing her daughter after Constantine, the maid, has died.  But the other maids tell Skeeter that one of the hardest aspects of their lives is having to leave their own children to make a living caring for the children of (mostly idle) white women.

The picture of small-town middle-class Southern white women's lives is dead-on. I was a child in the 1960s, but even then I could see the deadening boredom yet privilege of the endless rounds of bridge, country club lunches, and Junior League meetings.  Luckily, I escaped that, partly just by being born late enough that that life was no longer mandatory for middle-class white women by the time I grew up.  But I enjoyed the skewering that Stockett delivers to the complacent grande dames of the country clubs.

One amazing thing is the way in which Stockett manages to make something new grow out of the well-plowed ground of race relations in the South.  Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor are all hard acts to follow.  But the stories of Faulkner's families, black and white, inter-related by blood and history, start before the Civil War and end around the 1940s.  Faulkner didn't write about the 1960s.  Welty and O'Connor touched on the intimacy and distance of these black and white cousins trenchantly in the 1960s, but it was not the centerpiece of their oevres, as it was with Faulkner.  Since the 1950s and 1960s, many black writers have illuminated the lives of black people in slavery and afterwards, writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  Recently, in the last forty years or so, it seems that it's been rare for a  writer entered into the imaginative and emotional life of both white and black people as thoroughly as Faulkner did, with an understanding that doesn't oversimplify the complexity of either race's experience.  Stockett has come close to Faulkner's high standard in that department.  It's a brave attempt. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do.  Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

She can't match his style, obviously, and there are no modernist breakthroughs here as there were in The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying.  Stockett benefits from her reading of Faulkner:  she lets the characters speak for themselves, as Faulkner did in those two books.  It's not exactly stream-of-consciousness, and that's a good thing:  The Help is a much more accessible book than The Sound and the Fury, if a less rich one textually.  It's not the kind of book that scholars will be poring over for decades to come, but it's a damn good read.  Whereas many if not most readers are put off by the difficulty of Faulkner's voices, with their highly cryptic allusiveness to dreams and other voices--the "tale told by an idiot" in particular--readers are quickly drawn in by the warm and very real voices of Stockett's likeable characters.  Nobody likes Jason Compson.

At first Stockett's impersonation of the way black women talk sort of irritated me:  it seemed a bit fake and annoying.  But eventually the authenticity of the voices won me over. Some people really did talk like that; some still do.  Skeeter's voice is also believable, quirky, and funny.  Getting a character's voice right-- her  speech patterns and accent--without "dumbing down" her voice is tricky, and Stockett nails it.  She has obviously read her Huckleberry Finn, and her Alice Walker.  It's hard to get these characters' voices out of your head when you put the book down, and that's a good test of a voice's authenticity.

In the epilogue, Stockett goes into memoir mode and tells why she wrote the book:  in part it was in tribute to the black woman who raised her.  I kind of wondered why she didn't just write a memoir; why did she feel as if she needed to write a novel, when her own story and Demetrie's story was so compelling?  I think it might be because she wanted it to be about more than just herself and Demetrie.  She was able to populate her book with not just middle-class white women, but a memorable "white trash" woman too; not just with saintly black women but with at least one mean and bitter one.  This terrain of black and white women was treacherous:  she could have lapsed into caricature and stereotype and sentimentality, and at times she comes pretty close.  But in the end, the black women are not all saints and the white women are not all snotty, frigid, and lazy.

She says there is one line in The Help that sums up the meaning of the book:

"Wasn't that the point of the book?  For women to realize, We are just two people.  Not that much separates us.  Not nearly as much as I thought."