Here are some of the first similarities I noticed between our curriculum in American Studies and the novel, "The Help", by Kathryn Stockett.
-Early on in the book, we find out that one of the African American maids, Aibleen, has a special gift for making things happen whenever she prays for it. On page 26, Aibleen doubts her supposed abilities by saying, "You saying people think I got the black magic?" This reminds me of a discussion we had a couple times this year, while reading Frederick Douglas and while reading Huck Finn. We talked about the old stereotype that African Americans were more likely to have some sort of supernatural connection, also known as "black magic". One modern day example of this is the show "That's So Raven" on the Disney Channel. At the time it aired, it was the only show with an African American main character and she happened to be a psychic teenage girl named Raven.
-One of the main focuses of this novel is about Miss Skeeter, a young girl just out of college, deciding to write a book of stories about what life is like from the help's perspective. She conducts many interviews and has to edit their stories to make them ready to be printed in a book. You could say that she was writing a book of oral histories. I can definitely understand where she is coming from when she talks about how difficult writing this sort of paper because we wrote an oral history paper at the beginning of the school year. Our challenge was to interview a person and then edit their words (the original transcript of my interview was about 10 pages long) into a cohesive story without adding any of our own words. I found this task very difficult but intriguing at the same time. I can only imagine how difficult it was for Miss Skeeter to write an entire novel this way.
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