My wife and I went to see The Help last weekend. She had read the book and wanted to see how true the movie was to the book. She assured me I would love it and, as usual, she was correct. I laughed, felt tears and, most of all, it got me to thinking again, a dangerous thing as I have mentioned before. Itgot me thinking about my childhood days in North Carolina and all “The Help” I remembered from those days. So below are some of those people who served my family and myself with patience and quiet dignity in that watershed time just as the storm of Civil Rights was breaking across the South.
Here’s to Rosa Lee Scales. I previously wrote about Rosa Lee in my blog titled At the Movies. Rosa Lee was my babysitter during those preschool formative years. Yet she was more than just a babysitter. She taught me my ABC’s, how to count to a hundred, and the difference between red, green, blue; all the basic colors. My parents trusted this teenage “colored girl” with their only child, day in and day out, but she could not be trusted to buy a box of popcorn from the Whites Only concession stand at the theater lest she contaminate the whole community.
Here’s to Pearl Lowe. Pearl cooked and cleaned for my Mother and to invoke her name reawakens in my olfactory the smell of fried rabbit, gravy and scrambled eggs on crisp, cool Saturday mornings. My daddy kept a rabbit gum (trap) in the woods just behind our house and when he caught one, he broke its neck and gave it to Pearl. She would clean it, cook it, and serve it up. My family had a cottage at Carolina Beach where we always went for vacation. My mother complained enough on one occasion about it being no vacation for her because she had to do all the cooking and cleaning so that daddy gave permission for Pearl to accompany us. I can vividly recall that Pearl cooked every meal we ate for a week including fried flounder and hush puppies that would bring tears to your eyes. I also recall that she ate every one of her meals standing at the kitchen sink, not allowed to sit at anytime at the table where the family ate. I also remember that the closest she came to the beach was to stand on the front porch. No way a “colored woman” could step on the same sand as “white folks.”
Here’s to Reverend Ollie Tatum. Ollie was the most respected person in the entire African-American community; respected by blacks and whites alike. He preached on Sunday but made a living cleaning the downtown businesses after they closed for the day. Ollie probably had a key to every store in town including the local bank. It was a local joke at the time that when you saw someone with a big key ring on his belt you’d say, “Lord he’s got more keys than Ollie Tatum.’ Ollie was trusted alone with all those goods in all those stores for all those years and yet could not contaminate the local public water fountain by drinking from it.
Here’s to Lucille whose last name, regrettably, I cannot recall. Lucille cleaned once a week for my grandmother. Once, in the middle of the turbulent Civil Rights period in the early 1960’s my grandmother asked Lucille what she thought of Martin Luther King. Lucille replied, as I recall, that, “that man is just stirring up a lot of trouble for his own people. He ought to leave well enough alone.” My Grandmother quoted these words over and over again to her friends as an example of how most of the “good coloreds” didn’t care for King. Sometime after this, when I had my brand spanking new drivers license, I had to go pick up Lucille and bring her to my grandmother’s house. She wasn’t quite ready and as I waited in her tiny living room I noticed a framed picture of Martin Luther King in the center of her mantle, with a picture of Jesus on the right and a family photo on the left. When Lucille came in to the room she saw me looking at the mantle, walked over and turned the picture of King face down. She murmured, “Don’t know how that got there”.
Here’s to Johnny Golden who, along with my great aunt were the original Driving Miss Daisy couple; sort of. Johnny was a handsome man with a love for strong drink and pretty women. He and his wife must have separated and gotten back together a dozen times and my great aunt probably posted bail that often when Johnny got arrested for fighting or public drunkenness. I remember he had a prominent gold tooth that gave him a rakish look and that he wore a do-rag when he did manual labor. My great aunt could be counted on to do two things each year; one was to buy a new Cadillac and the other was to take a trip to Nags Head on the North Carolina Outer Banks. That is where the “Driving Miss Daisy” part comes in. Johnny always chauffeured her on these trips. He was trusted to be alone with a white woman in a car, not just any car, but trusted with a brand new Cadillac. Yet when they got to Nags Head and unloaded my great aunt’s bags at the hotel, Johnny was on his own to find lodging for surely no one, not even Johnny, could imagine a “colored” staying at a white hotel.
Finally here’s to Kathryn Stockett for writing The Help and showing how silly we “white folks” were back then, how unknowingly cruel we were back then, and most importantly what The Help, who we saw as background wallpaper, were really thinking and saying back then.
