“A Stake in the Story”: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help , Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby , and the Politics of Southern Storytelling

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In afterword to bestselling 2009 novel The Help, titled Little, Too Late, author Kathryn Stockett voices a certain trepidation about a terrible line, writing in voice of a black person and worries that she has told both too much and too little in her of African American domestics and white southern ladies they work for in 1960s Mississippi. She concludes her afterword, though, by suggesting benefits of crossing that line, benefits that included discovering commonality of black and white stories and ephemerality of racial difference. Above all, she asserts that novel enabled her to ask her real-life African American maid Demetrie, long since deceased, unspoken question of her childhood--what was it like working for Stockett's fragmented white family? I've spent years imagining what her answer would be, her afterword concludes. And that's why I wrote this book. (1) Those concluding words appear to resolve her initial doubts--and therein lies one of most disturbing aspects of The Help and its staggering success, especially when contrasted with another novel by a white writer about a white employer and her black maid in 1960s Mississippi, Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby. Published in 1988, Douglas's novel was greeted with respectful critical, sometimes conflicting, reviews but virtually none of popular acclaim that has made The Help such a striking cultural phenomenon. Stockett's wildly popular novel quite simply appropriates an African American and turns it into one of white guilt, redemption, reconciliation, and triumph, a transformation that is all too common in white southern storytelling and that is thrown into sharp relief by Douglas's highly self-conscious postmodern novel. Can't Quit You, Baby offers none of resolution and reassurance that The Help displays to a contemporary audience eager for confirmation that country's legacy of racism and injustice has been left safely in past. If anything, Douglas's novel, in words of critic Karen Jacobsen, to foreground what most of us would like to forget, ignore, or deny--the continued difficulty that black and white women have in forming friendships with each other. (2) Unlike Stockett, Douglas does so by consistently and uncomfortably questioning her own narrative authority to tell stories crossing racial lines and brings attention again and again to all those long-simmering tensions lying just beneath surface of her storytelling--silences, habits of willed deafness and amnesia, refusals, and outright disavowals, and she does so by asking again and again what her own in story is--and by implication, reader's stake in as well. (3) Josephine Haxton started raising uncomfortable questions for herself and her readers from outset of her career, when she made decision to publish under pseudonym of Ellen Douglas to avoid potentially embarrassing her conservative, devout family. (4) That decision may also have had a good deal to do with her response to Brown v. Board of Education, which, she notes in her 2004 essay collection Witnessing, had a lasting impact on all her reading and writing to follow, particularly her stunning 1963 short collection Black Cloud, White Cloud. (5) In that collection, after exposes hierarchical, volatile, and sometimes explosive relationship of white employers and African American employees in a segregated society--what she herself called later the world of black and white people together--the terrible world of masters and servants. (6) But it was in 1988 that Douglas published her experimental and self-interrogative novel Can't Quit You, Baby about that most traditional of relationships, that of a privileged white woman and her African American housekeeper. Douglas's novel, like The Help, is set in Mississippi in 1960s, albeit a few years after height of Civil Rights Movement, and like The Help again Can't Quit You, Baby focuses on layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee--but in ways that are far more unsettling than portrayed in The Help. …