THE HELP: EPILOGUE

Have you ever read a book that really got the wheels turning in your head, and kept them going, long after you'd finished it? That's how you know it's not a good one, it's a great one. It happened to me with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and is happening again with The Help. It made me question a lot of things having to do with my childhood, and my mother's, and why we were such drastically different people. I could see parts of my mother in several of this book's characters, and it got me to wondering, as I have many a time, how she ever came to be so embarrassingly pretentious. I used to think it was because she and my dad had money for a while, then lost it, but really, I think it goes even further back, to the fact that both her parents came from money, and then lost it.

She grew up with Mimi feeding her stories about how she and Grandad had honeymooned on some uncle's plantation, and how her grandfather was a famous musician and another relative was a riverboat captain. Her grandparents and aunts lived in these big beautiful Victorian houses, while they had six people stuffed in a tiny two bedroom bungalow. Apparently my grandparents had to get married as teens (though my mom didn't discover that until she was in her 50's). My grandfather used his family money to open a business of some sort, but then lost it in the depression, and was content to work as a draftsman from then on. Even so, they somehow managed to keep a black maid named Teetah, who had a room out off the garage, the whole time she was growing up. Perhaps Mimi's stories led her to believe she'd somehow been cheated out of being one of those society ladies. I expect she must have thought she'd died and gone to heaven in the early days after the war, when Dad's home-building business was going great guns, and they were members of the country club, drove fancy cars, lived in one of Dad's custom built homes, and had a full-time maid of their own. Geneva was like a second mom to me and my little brother, until I was eight and my dad lost his business. Not only did we lose Geneva, but we were left with an extremely depressed, bitter mother, who probably felt like she'd been cheated out of what was rightfully hers not once, but twice!

Funny, how it took reading this book, for me to figure all that out.