Originally appeared in the features section of The News & Observer:
By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler
Staff writer
The college professor teaching my freshman music appreciation class circled the word three times in red, adding a couple of exclamation points for emphasis. The grade on my review of a Lionel Hampton Orchestra performance is lost to time, but my mortification over my ignorance in referring in it to black people as "Negroes" stings to this day.
Growing up in the 1970s in an all-white West Virginia subdivision, in an all-white town, I lived in an isolated world that held exactly two African-Americans: the one black girl who briefly attended my high school with 1,300 white students and the one lovely black woman who occasionally led my mother's charismatic Christian women's fellowship. No one called April "the black student." No one called Myrna the "black woman." They were just April and Myrna.
So I didn't know how black people were referring to their ethnicity. In high school, I had written a research paper on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, having sat transfixed inside the area's largest library as I listened to scratchy recordings of his powerful words - words that included "Negro."
I just didn't know the times had changed. It wasn't malicious. It was ignorance.
And that's part of the beauty of movies and books like "The Help." Among the heart-stirring characters and laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue lies a sobering education in the realities of the Jim Crow South. It's a lesson we still need, given that the farther we get from the 1960s, the harder it can be to believe that this horror actually occurred in our country.
As I watched a special screening of "The Help" - a superb movie in nearly every way - I kept thinking that its real power lay in leading us to the empathy a functioning society requires. My eyes welled up the first of several times during a scene in which black people were streaming up the steps of a restaurant, dutifully following the path marked "Colored." That sign, the cruelty and indignity of it, never fails to affect me this way.
That I was a white person sitting among a mostly African-American audience made my usual disgust over that sign especially acute. That the vast majority of the movie's white characters were reprehensible (and no doubt historically accurate) left me cringing. That the black characters were so real, so complex and so likable had me wondering why some African-Americans have so vehemently assailed the book the movie is based upon.
In an essay in Entertainment Weekly, writer Martha Southgate said that "The Help" to her is just another story in which a white person plays the hero of the civil rights movement, relegating blacks to bit players.
But even Skeeter, the white protagonist who is gathering up the stories of black maids working in white homes for an expose-type book, says when another character asks how she feels: This isn't about me. It doesn't matter how I feel.
And that's how the movie felt to me. That it wasn't about her. It was about looking beyond the ubiquitous maid's uniform that apparently made black women invisible (when they weren't subhuman) in certain upper-class homes of the South in the 1960s and seeing them, acknowledging them and their pain, knowing them, empathizing with them. And loving them.
"What does it feel like to be me?" asks Aibileen, the courageous star of this story, somewhat in wonder after Skeeter tries to draw from her the stories of being a maid in a hideous white home. Aibileen invokes the agony of losing her beloved son, who died when a white foreman at a lumber yard threw the severely injured worker into the back of his pickup truck and dumped him at the black hospital across town with only a honk.
"Every year on the day of his death, I can't breathe, and to you all it's just another day of (playing) bridge," Aibileen says.
No one who sees "The Help" can leave it without acknowledging the real cruelty and indignities that so many African-Americans endured in this country. No viewer can later say, "I just didn't know."
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