Carrie Rollwagen

I enjoyed the book The Help, and I think it brought up some important civil rights issues — or at least helped us understand, through story, a little of the pain people were subjected to not very long ago. But something about the author Kathryn Stockett’s research — a lot of her first-hand knowledge of the African-American perspective came from her observations of the family’s black maid — never sat right with me. I know she was a child at the time, and not the perpetrator of abuse. Still, it seemed odd for a white woman to tell a black woman’s story (and, yes, I know that the storyline of The Help is about a white woman who tells black women’s stories).

Walter Bennett signs books at Emmet O’Neal Library.

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