For the first time in my life, I read a book because of a coin flip.

I had “The Help” in my Netflix queue for roughly 328947 months with the vague idea I might want to read the book before seeing the movie.  I also thought AV had taken that path, so I asked her if I should bother doing the book-before-movie route.

Turned out she hadn’t read the book, but was ready to help me decide.

“Soooo I’ll flip a coin?  And then tell you?”  Heads was book-first.  It was heads.

As is usually the case, if you’re even thinking about doing both the book and the movie, reading before watching was definitely the way to go.  Even the longest movie leaves out important pieces that give contextual weight to scenes that otherwise really miss something.  And with a book criticized for being a reductionist “whitewashing,” paring down the elements even more certainly did it no favors.

I won’t begin to delve into all of those pieces since seemingly everyone else weighed in a year ago.  But I can certainly see the argument that the story is about a young white woman who heroically used her words to upend the oppressive social structure of this town and lift the black maids from a state of helplessness.  The movie version — much more than the book — vastly understates the conditions in the Jim Crow South, making it seem like one woman in this town was responsible for prolonging segregation and discrimination, and that neither is so bad.  The depth of dehumanization is not there.

One example of how I think the movie story really gave critics some ammo comes at the end, when one of the maids, Minny, is treated to a meal by her employers.   A short time earlier, there is a brief allusion to the fact that she may be facing violence from her husband, Leroy, but nothing is explicitly explained.  When she sits down at this table of food, the maid who narrates the story says it “gave Minny the strength she needed — she took her babies out from under Leroy and never went back.”

But in the book, Minny doesn’t leave Leroy because a white couple made her dinner.  She faces pervasive abuse throughout the book, staying strong in the face of such abuse for the sake of her kids and needing Leroy’s salary to help provide for them.  In the fallout from the book of maids’ stories being published, Leroy loses his job and attacks Minny in a rage.  At her limit, and with some money from the book, she leaves:  “I done took this long enough…God help him, but Leroy don’t know what Minny Jackson about to become.”

The power in those scenes is entirely different.  “Thanks for the mashed potatoes” is not the same as “ENOUGH.”

Despite the oversights, I did like both the book and the movie.  The book is well-written and develops a host of characters that show there is no stereotypical perspective of a black maid just as there is no one white employer.  It’s a range, just as in today’s world in which discrimination lives on in many forms.

“The Help” is a good story — just an incomplete one.  I think the last paragraph of this New York Times review sums it up well:

“At one point Skeeter [main, white character played in the movie by Emma Stone] hears a strange new guy, Bob Dylan, singing a strange new song, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ and finds herself full of optimism. Had she heard the same Bob Dylan singing ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ his accusatory song about the fatal caning of a 51-year-old black barmaid by a young white patrician, ‘The Help’ might have ventured outside its harsh yet still comfortable, reader-friendly world.