Who Now Helps the Help?
In his essay entitled “The Call to Service,” John Erskine posed these questions:
Do you look on the unfortunate as your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity? Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served? If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?
Those questions caused me to think about the movie The Help. No, I have not read the book. The film’s most obvious biases were the usual ones: Southerners have historically mistreated Negroes, have underpaid them, have insulted them, have abused them, have even sometimes killed them. Nonetheless, colored maids, cooks, and nurses raised and loved the white children in the homes where The Help were employed. There are essentially two groups of women in the movie: the spoiled, beautiful, idle, well-to-do, and insensitive white women; and the hard-working, underpaid, loyal, loving, and sensitive uniformed colored women. Given that lineup, the story is simply one about the hardships and travails of The Help at the hands of the privileged young matrons. Ordinarily, such a tale would hardly qualify for a ten-minute, one-act, high-school play. However, that test is not applied to efforts to lambaste Southern whites for their never-ending offenses against blacks. The self-styled “good people” just can’t get enough Rebel-rousing. And neither can the book, magazine, and newspaper publishers and the TV and movie producers. Discrimination and diatribes against Southern whites are greatly encouraged. We are often reduced to the nation’s N-word. We are the objects but not the subjects of sensitivity training.
Apparently, the story takes place in the 1960’s, and would not be applicable to the present day—not because white Southerners have improved that much, but because very few of us have help anymore. Some years ago, I read a remarkable account of a black woman who worked for a wealthy family in Chicago. For many years she was exposed to the good manners, good taste, and good educational standards of the family. She and her husband had several children of their own, and she instilled in them the values she had learned in her workplace. Every one of their many children graduated from college, and several of them earned graduate degrees. She attributed what she had passed on to her children to what she had learned from those for whom she worked. She was not resentful; she was very grateful, but then she wasn’t in the South, and maybe she wasn’t referred to as The Help. Also, everyone knows there’s no racial discrimination in Chicago.
Many years ago, when I was young, we had servants. In my family’s modest home we had a maid five days a week, and a laundress one day a week. However, my maternal grandparents had three full-time servants: a chauffeur and butler, a cook, and a maid. Without dwelling on it, I’ll assume the servants needed to work in order to support themselves. You may not believe it, and frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn if you don’t, but each of the servants was treated as part of the family. They may not have been integrated round and about town, but in our homes they were much cared about as human beings. In fact, I was always much closer to my grandmother’s chauffeur, Joseph Augustus, than I ever was to my own father. Joseph even called me “Son.” And throughout our long relationships, we learned many valuable lessons from our servants, and they from us. Of course, in addition to having us, they had families of their own. And guess what, Scarlett, photographs of their children and grandchildren were displayed along with those of our own family.
Furthermore, their families were, with very few exceptions, law abiding, hardworking, respectful, and respectable. They did not commit crimes. They did not use drugs. They had no tattoos or piercings. The boys didn’t wear earrings and necklaces. They were always neatly and well dressed. Perhaps the professional do-gooders will say “they were afraid not to conduct themselves in those ways.” Just try to imagine the brutality involved in encouraging people not to commit crimes and use drugs! How fortunate we are to have overcome setting such examples.
The fact is that in spite of the many past instances and customs of racial discrimination, the two races have never been further apart from each other than they are now. There are no bonds, no connections of mutual benefit. We are all committed to that brilliant system established by the Great Society, “diversity without differences.” We are forced to acknowledge and respect different cultures without being able to discuss the differences. Oh, how insensitive sensitivity can be. And how very absurd.
There may no longer be any beneficial bonds between the races, but many destructive and detrimental influences continue. Consider the ways black music, dress, language, slang, jewelry, etc., have influenced white kids. You may not mind; I do. And consider the awful effects selfish and greedy politicians and “businessmen” have had on black society in efforts to get votes and to sell goods. Elected officials use taxpayer dollars to provide funds for black people to use to buy products. Under our current economic system, more and more consumers are sought, and it doesn’t matter how their purchasing power is provided. Public money for private sales is not only permissible; it is aided and abetted.
We’re on to something radical. Essentially, it has to do with the creation of a welfare society to maintain and sustain people as consumers. Every government program created by the Great Society made it possible for the unemployed to become consumers. Therefore, one must question whether big business is really opposed to the welfare state. This is a form of government capitalism, even though the terms would seem contradictory. Because such a domestic system is inadequate for unlimited sales, the emphasis is then put on worldwide free trade in order to have access to consumers everywhere.
So the Southern whites no longer have help, and the Southern blacks no longer have jobs. Government now provides what “benefits” the less-educated and less-prosperous people have. Poverty has been redefined. It can now mean an apartment instead of a private home; only two television sets and three cellphones; only one good car; and several pairs of hundred-dollar Nikes. Sadly, it can also mean graduating from high school and not being able to read and write above a fifth-grade level. It can easily involve a life of crime, drug use, and imprisonment.
It seems as if many aspects of the bad old days were much better than those of the good new days. Can we really take any comfort from the knowledge that the close and mutually beneficial relationships between the races that once existed have been torn apart and destroyed?
A strong case can be made that The Help was actually two groups, both the employers and the employees. There was a time in the South when most people, black and white, were servants who served one another in many helpful ways. Government has deprived us of that relationship. We must now be satisfied to cheer impersonally for our athletes. But little has changed for our New England acquaintances, who still sit in their yacht clubs in their lily-white towns and harshly judge those who have never owned a slave and who have worked to better the condition of those who were never slaves. How sad it is that The Help are now solely dependent on the government for help. To answer John Erskine, everyone’s function is to serve. Thus, they can never lose their careers. We have lost ours.
Ben C. Toledano is an author and a lawyer.
This article first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
Throughout the later 19th and earlier 20th century, the very wealthiest Northerners preferred for black servants who had been trained in Southern households. Naturally the servants improved the Yankees manners and character.
"servants ....who had been trained in Southern households. Naturally the servants improved the Yankees manners and character."
Dr. Wilson,
This remains true today although the servants are no longer predominantly of color. Even the Yankees who were invited down as guest workers and professors for Southern schools and Universities have benefited from the experience, although with certain rare exceptions they have comitted grave damage to the institutions and culture they served.
I recommend Archibald Rutledge’s fine book God’s People. The black folks are represented as skilled workers, servants, and craftsman. Here there is an authentic bond and mutual respect between white and black. Though a paternalistic ethos has long been condemned as something wicked, I’m open to the possibility that it was a much better custom than what we have now.
On the point of blacks and manners, I have noticed that whenever I meet someone who impresses me with genuine humility and a soft conversational manner, it is usually a black man or woman over the age of 50. I live in the northeast, but I suspect many of these folks have southern roots. Naturally, humility and the cultivation of leisured manners are barriers to “success” in a ruthless, high-tech society. Perhaps this is one reason why blacks are having such a rough time of it. Could it be that modernity, not the legacy of slavery, is most responsible for the suffering of blacks in America?
Correction: the book title is God's Children.
That "the legacy of slavery" is responsible for dysfunction among black Americans is among the most long-lasting lies of the Great Society and the 60s. It was put forward by the Kerner Commission as explanation for riots, etc. (Kerner NOT being one of the few governors of Illinois never sent to prison). Reconstruction was an effort to create dysfunction in the black population in order to maintain the Republican party in power. It made some headway but did not succeed entirely. It can very plainly be shown by social statistics that the breakdown (crime, unemployment, illegitimacy) began in the late 19th century when the civilising influence of the old regime had worn off. I dont think that the old saw that welfare created dependency and family breakdown is true either, though it is a boilerplate of official conservatism, like all Republican party shiboleths false and superficial. The dysfunction in the Northern cities began BEFORE welfare was a major institution. It appeared when black people left the South and settled in the Northern big cities where they confronted hypocricy, hostility, alienation, and cynical political manipulation. With how many lies do Americans comfort themselves and blame their bad character on others.
Dr. Wilson,
I have, as you have already stated, long held that the ghettoization of black Americans in Northern cities was the primary cause of the decay of their communities. Now this ghetto "worldview" is being marketed by Madison Avenue and Hollywood across the country, so that blacks, particularly black youth (no few whites as well), have become clones of intercity decay, even in small towns and in rural areas.
As the principal of a newly consolidated school, a predominately black school, I observed that the students from town could have easily been from Detroit or Watts. Ironically, it was not the few whites who had to attend the consolidated school who had the most trouble; it was the rural black kids still imbued with the manners and customs or rural life who had the most trouble. In fact, almost all of them had to leave the consolidated school. Some of them, I had to place as "home-bound" because they were aliens in the ghetto anti-culture which dominated the school.
Mr. Peters,
As always, you have spoken well.
Digital Television for rural areas has been a curse disguised as a blessing in most respects. Also the constant portrayal of Southerners as poor, stupid, rough, backward neanderthals in need of assistance from the intelligent, refined , forward leaning, citizens of Washington D.C. doesn't help.
In the middle ages the anti-christ was painted with his knee caps on the back of his legs ( or his knees backwards), he was a lonely creature who refused to kneel --even before his God. Next to the famous Hollywood sign, Southerners should commission a sculptor to portray such a being for our times and send it North.
Gentlemen, please say more, if you wish. This is an enlightening conversation for me. I hadn't thought about the phenomena of black degradation in this country anywhere near as closely as Dr. Wilson, who puts in focus matters that I had long left fuzzy. For instance, while I had thought that "the legacy of slavery" lacked all explanatory force, I had forgotten (if I'd ever known) that it was concocted by the Kerner commission. I needed reminding of how specious blaming welfare is, too. Did the thrust toward decaying black families and chronic black political begging/threatening begin in earnest with the debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, i.e., between citizenship and self-reliance on the one hand and social-transformation-cum-revolution on the other? As we know, DuBois won, ultimately to defect to Moscow.
Mr. Olson,
The only thing I would add, and you already know this, is that our civilization reposed on slavery for most of its life. It was only after the Incarnation and the slow acceptance of its meaning and integration within the older context of western culture that it slowly disappeared. My family's founder came to Virginia in the early 1700's and at one time owned 52 slaves while living in North Carolina. Yet, before the civil war most of them had been freed and were referred to in correspondence as part of respective families as in "their family consisted of "three sons, two daughters and two slaves, Constance and Harry. " Most of their personal and legal Wills concluded with the admonition " free ( whatever name), who was so faithful and good, ..... ! "
Today everything is like family ---- sports teams are "like family", business enterprises ( so long as the money is good) are "like family", all campaign victories are attributed to the campaigns ability to work together " like family",successful community enterprises are described in the same way " like family." In fact the only thing that no longer resembles anything like a family is the traditional family that created and settled America.
Clyde Wilson has been described by his hateful detractors as a hater for making the following remarks in 1998, to Gentleman's Quarterly, :" Southerners "don't want women in the armed forces. We don't want the federal government telling us what to do, pushing integration down our throats, saying we can't pray in school. We don't want abortion or gay rights. We're tired of carpetbagging professionals coming to our campuses and teaching that the South is a cultural wasteland."
Anyone who thinks Obama or Romney is even remotely capable of seeing it Clyde's way, is nuts, nuts, nuts !!! If it was hateful in 1998 to say such things, I am sure it is probably a crime today. Yet,Dr. Wilson for the most part, was telling the truth.
Ray, as usual you center in on the right questions. I don't know the whole answer. Of course, DuBois was almost totally vanquished at the time and for long after, having no real following among black people.
Heaven knows, things were not perfect in the South before 1954, but they were for the most part peaceful and enjoying real if slow progress. The black schools did really educate (unlike today) and the black middle class was growing. The Southern States, out of their poverty, were spending proportionately more of their income on the black schools than Northern States were spending on education, and had been doing so since the late 19th century. Anyone who grew up in the South before 1954 knows from personal experience how much genuine mutual collaboration and respect there was among great numbers of people from both races. The great problem of the South was not race but the poverty of both races which had been inflicted upon us by violent destruction and long-continued legislative exploitation. The modern civil rights movement was not, as I see it, a spontaneous movement. Like so many other bad things it was contrived by Communists and fellow travelers who hid in Washington offices during World War II while Americans were risking life and limb for their country, drawing up plans for the socialist paradise that was to be erected by the war powers when the fighting was over. As tension grew in the Northern cities it also became necessary to deflect the problem back to the standard pariah, the South. It has been documented that when race riots occurred in Chicago, Detroit, etc., the press blamed the riots on "Southern hillbillies" who had come north to work. In fact, Southerners were near totally absent from the white rioters, who were nearly all ethnics. It was in World War II and after that the plans were brought to fruition that brought us to the condition of dependency and perpetual accusation and demand that you describe today. It has also been shown that the '54 decision was contrived by clandestine collusion among Supreme Court staffers and rested upon sociological evidence that was both false and irrelevant. It certainly did not represent any soberly deliberated and decided act of the people. There followed an uneasy period in which facts were massively represented by the news media and academy in the interest of supposed charity and making America an example worthy to lead the way to world democracy in the United Nations. There followed the Civil Rights acts in which both parties and the national establishment basked in moral glory in at last imposing justice on the evil South. If they had realised that those laws would soon be turned to use outside the South, the laws would not have been passed. I would say that today the South in its traditional way has to some degree even managed to humanise the new situation into a fairly peaceful accommodation. I think any observer will agree that there is far more racial turmoil and antagonism, and far more segregation, in the North than in the South, except for those Southern big cities that have been Americanised.
The history of this is yet to be written. What is sure is that the vastly subsidised and promoted standard history of 20th century race relations is defective and partisan.
Mr. Reavis, as I have written elsewhere, I did not make the remark to Gentleman's Quarterly about integration being shoved down throats. The conversation was primarily about the need to preserve Southern culture, which was not a racial question.
Dr. Wilson,
What I know about you is that you are a gentlemen and a scholar who loves his country, and by all appearances, his God and his neighbors. I don't care what "they say" you said, I have seen other good men like yourself publicly ridiculed, their careers brought to naught and their families almost ruined at the hands of these"they- sayers" and before my very eyes as a relatively young man when such impressions were lasting. I am quite accustomed to their taunts and tactics. My impression of you is that of a man with a cultivated heart and a Southern scholar. You need not defend yourself to me.
Thank you again, Clyde, for further enlightenment and re-enlightenment. I think the scales first started falling from my eyes anent race relations in the South when I came to appreciate in the late '60s how many of the early country musicians I admired pronounced their indebtedness to older black players, of whom they spoke with whole-hearted affection. If things in the South were as the media said they'd always been, surely there couldn't have been such close musical friendships, especially because the whites involved were so frequently the dreaded poor whites. Not much later, I learned that the worst race riots, such as in Chicago in 1919, were invariably Northern affairs, and of course there was the spectacle of Boston, then ongoing. Young radical I may have been, but it was clear to me that I largely hadn't been told and wasn't then being told the truth about the Southern history. I wish I could say that situation has changed.
Mr. Reavis--Robert--your remarks on "being like family" certainly hit the nail head-on. On the other hand, I like the high level of superficial geniality between tradespeople and clientele that seems much more prevalent these days, compared to the testy or distracted aura that I recall such relations transpiring in in the 60s-through-80s, especially. Everybody, including me, seemed to have chips teetering on both shoulders. If there's no deep friendliness today, I find I can at least bring humor and fellow-feeling to the exchange and usually have them returned.
"I would say that today the South in its traditional way has to some degree even managed to humanise the new situation into a fairly peaceful accommodation. I think any observer will agree that there is far more racial turmoil and antagonism, and far more segregation, in the North than in the South, except for those Southern big cities that have been Americanised."
Dr. Wilson,
I agree with you in the sense that the South, relative to the North, is doing better with the racial turmoil. However, having spent some time, off and on, in some very rural towns in Alabama I can vouch that things there are not so good (they're not good in the cities in Alabama, either, but that's to be expected). I cannot extrapolate my own experience to speak for all of the rural south, but in these small towns, which are dying away from lack of money and lack of people, racial animosity has been steadily growing. It seems especially true with folks starting in my own generation, around 25s to 35s. About a decade or so ago, some of the older white folks still invited black folks into their homes to help watch/nurse the children. That type of bond is just non-existent with the next generation. There is also, amongst the younger black generation, many instances of that "the world owes me a %#!#$ livin'" attitude (e.g. walking in the middle of the streets, strutting through the Piggly Wiggly with glares for one and all . . .etc.) With the younger white generation there is more the sense that to be a man one must be an uncouth redneck that loves football, hunting, beer, and porn, and not necessarily in that order. There is still a veneer of manners that shows up in formal occasions, like weddings, at least with the younger white kids.
Thanks to Direct TV and Satellite Internet and such, the American pipelines of filth easily find their way into even the most remote places. Couple this with the practical disintegration of the education system in these towns (the school my wife, her friends, and many of their parents attended is barely a shell of its former self).
Additionally, I can say with certainty of my friends and acquaintances there that the current Commander in Chief has made things worse in his 3 short (but oh so long) years. There is now, perhaps unsaid but felt, a sense of "us" vs. "them" that wasn't so palpable a few years ago. (Please don't misunderstand me; I am NOT echoing the media by trying to say that opponents of the President are racist.)
Everyone, on both sides, just seems to get angrier and angrier as the days go by. Can an explosion be that far off?
"I like the high level of superficial geniality between tradespeople and clientele that seems much more prevalent these days, compared to the testy or distracted aura that I recall such relations transpiring in in the 60s-through-80s, especially. Everybody, including me, seemed to have chips teetering on both shoulders. If there's no deep friendliness today, I find I can at least bring humor and fellow-feeling to the exchange and usually have them returned."
Mr. Olson,
Yes, that it is a good observation concerning some of the benefits of a communal inannity or even the husks of good manners. My own recollection of the 60's through 80's was a a childhood that Scout, as described by Harper Lee, would have found familiar, a college experience that was deeply divided between those who professed an order that could to be discovered from within the universe and those who thought order must be humanly imposed from without. My days in the Marine Corps were somewhat testy as the Corps still had their own way of doing things even as those things were dramatically changing.
Since then I too have found the most rewarding aspect is to try and do what you do quite easily -- concerning humor and fellow feeling --- I am not very good at it most of the time in the blogosphere but perhaps a little better in person. For instance, I quite enjoyed your last visit when you were headed South and other such visits from friends and relatives.
That was a wonderful visit. Thanks again, Mr. Reavis, for providing for it.
Mr. Cornell,
Your experience seems quite similar to my own..
1)"small towns, which are dying away from lack of money and lack of people."
The manufacturing plant was closed and moved to Mexico and then China some years ago.
2)"With the younger white generation there is more the sense that to be a man one must be an uncouth redneck that loves football, hunting, beer,.... etc."
Exept for your mention of pornography which is sinful, the uncouth redneck etc.
is not that they once enjoyed football, hunting or libations,... rather,that is all they have ever enjoyed, or are capable of enjoying to the end.
There is still a veneer of manners that shows up in formal occasions, like weddings,
I have not noticed even the veneer -- the dress and the manners are almost depleted at both weddings and funerals.
the American pipelines of filth easily find their way into even the most remote places. Couple this with the practical disintegration of the education system in these towns (the school my wife, her friends, and many of their parents attended is barely a shell of its former self).
Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for the good post.
Mr. Reavis and Mr. Cornell, I fear you are all too right. The behaviour of young white people is perhaps explainable by their sense that they are powerless in their own country.
"their sense that they are powerless in their own country."
Yes and looking for power in all the wrong places.
I'm very happy to see you posting comments, Dr. Wilson. I was worried about you and missed your wit and wisdom.
Thank you for your kind remarks.
You're welcome, Dr. Wilson. Now if you posted an essay or two, I'd be most grateful.
I have enjoyed this thread and especially the comments of Dr. Wilson. I also very much enjoyed
Dr. Wilson your review of the biography of "Little Jimmy" in this months Chronicles
My mother (b. 1907 – d. 2007) worked in a wealthy household as housekeeper in the late twenties–early thirties, and had a negro cook and maid working under her. Her manners, which she learned from her Connecticut Yankee schoolteacher mother and Connecticut Yankee woodsman father, were not improved, not did they need improvement, by contact with these people.
When I was jumped on and stomped by a gang of black boys in 1963 while walking outside my house, they specifically said, as they attacked, "Ain't got yo' dogs now, do you, honkey?" an explicit reference to the ongoing use of dogs against black demonstrators in the South at that time. Mysteriously, they left out all reference to having " ...confronted hypocrisy, hostility, alienation, and cynical political manipulation." upon coming north.
Now, we can talk about whether the use of dogs was justified and how the blacks were stirred up by outsiders, and we can certainly blame ethnics for the Chicago riots of '19 (now THERE'S some Chicago values – and we were better off when whites were capable of this kind of thing). I suggest that there was a little more than poverty at the root of the postbellum South's problems, and, pace the experiences of those who dealt with blacks in an employer/servant relationship, the main cause of the problem is rooted in blacks themselves. Those Jim Crow laws were in place for a good reason: their authors knew what blacks were capable of. They came North loaded for bear, and with good reason: there was a time when whites were capable of being as fierce as bears in defense of their own.
The second sentence in my comment of Aug 11, 6:32 PM above should read: Her manners, which she learned from her Connecticut Yankee schoolteacher mother and Connecticut Yankee woodsman father, did not need improvement, nor could they have been improved, by contact with these people.
A few further thoughts: if "Reconstruction was an effort to create dysfunction in the black population in order to maintain the Republican party in power." then was the passage of Jim Crow an attempt to suppress blacks so as to maintain the Democratic Party in power, or a well warranted attempt to safeguard whites? Or both?
When it comes to modern electoral politics, which were pretty well-enshrined in the U.S. some time before the Civil War, maintenance of one's own standing is always, ALWAYS a chief motivation. Those who think that in a non-democratic system aristocrats and monarchs only enact policies that benefit themselves and maintain themselves in power are completely blind to the disastrous whimsical nature of modern democracy. The secret to getting good policy enacted, in our current system, is to rig things such that the careers of a significant number of careers of cadres depends on its successful passage. In the present day, conservatives, whether they work inside or outside mainstream right-wing parties, seem to understand this very poorly, but not so long ago (space of about 7 or so decades) they remembered what it was like to hold power and to need to use and maintain it.
Anyway, that's a diversion from Jim Crow and Reconstruction, but I think it is important. Political intriguing tends to be overlooked in most readings of American history; perhaps somewhere in the American imagination remains a Washingtonian clacissism that idealizes a sort of transcendence above politics and partisanship. Noble as this ideal may be, it does not conform to the reality of American government and society as it became not too long after Independence. However, it may be so deeply essential to the conception and justification of the American entity that to saut it would call almost everything else into question.