This is Our County's Reality

After finishing this book, I remember having a mixed bag of feelings. I was happy that Skeeter accomplished what she wanted and got a job at Harper and Row. I was happy that the maids made a difference and had the black community supporting them. I was glad that Minny was leaving her abusive husband. However, I was unhappy on how accurately I feel this book portrays part of our country's past. I'm glad that it was accurate, but I didn't want to believe that it was true. I thought that when slavery was abolished, we no longer allowed only certain races to get unskilled low paying jobs. However this is not true. This book brings out the stark reality that we abolished slavery, wiping our hands free as a country saying we no longer tolerated it. When in fact the power didn't become equal, and the class structure in the communities and the values in the south continued to be the same. I think this definitely was the most powerful lesson that I took away from this book.

Thinking more about the story after finishing it, I began to question how children who are raised by the help can grow up and become just as mean to the help as their parents were. According to the book, most domestic help stayed with their employer for their life. Once they started working their as a teenager or young adult, they stayed until themselves or their employer died. This means that they raised their employers kids all the way until they got married. And after their employers died, they usually then went and worked for the same kids they raised. Those same kids ended up treating them as cruel as their parents, even though the maids raised them their whole lives. Even if they didn't go to work for the kids, they worked for people who were raised by the maids.

Treating somebody who should be your family even though you aren't blood related cruel I think is more harsh than the physical abuse slaves endured. I think this because many of the maids developed feelings for the kids they raised and wanted the best for them in life. In result the kids turned around and degraded their dignity and their character. In my book, I think that is a lot more cruel to do to a person even when compared to physically beating somebody. This is definitely a topic that I would be interested in researching. Especially because it seems that the economic standing in the community that somebody had, trumped the family relations that they had developed with domestic help.