The Help by Kathryn Stockett published in 2009, was adapted into a movie released today, August 9th, ten years ago. To celebrate, here are some quotes from the movie that had us cracking up:
Hilly Holbrook: They carry different diseases than we do. That’s why I’ve drafted the Home Health Sanitation Initiative.
Skeeter Phelan: That what?
Hilly Holbrook: A disease-preventative bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help. It’s been endorsed by the White Citizen’s Council.
Skeeter Phelan: Maybe we should just build you a bathroom outside, Hilly.
Missus Walters: I may have trouble rememberin’ my own name or what country I live in, but there are two things that I can’t seem to forget: that my own daughter threw me into a nursin’ home, and that she ate Minnie’s shit.
Minny Jackson: Forgive me, Lord, but I have to kill that woman, Aibileen. Now, she’s gone puttin’ pencil marks on my toilet paper.
Skeeter Phelan: [to Stuart] I’m sorry, but you were droppin’ your head as an infant or were you just born stupid?
![The Help by [Kathryn Stockett]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51W-HzcFZZL.jpg)
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s time to watch this period drama movie written and directed by Tate Taylor.