The Help Blog Chapters 31-34: The Ugly Truth

           In the final chapters of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, she explored an area in life that we rarely touch upon. It is what is hidden underneath our words, in our minds and is rarely expressed. It is part honesty and part cruelty, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Stockett let loose the ugly truth.

           Every single word in the book Skeeter wrote spills the secrets of the help and of the women they have worked for. For some of the help, the book ruins their lives and they are fired. But for others, things turn out better than before. Willie May had worked for a woman for thirty seven years and after the book came out, her and the woman she served sat at the same table for the very first time. Sometimes in life we just don’t realize things until they’re shoved right up in our faces. It could be that we’re too naïve, but most of the time it’s because there’s just too much going on around us. The ugly truth in America isn’t that there is one; but that we don’t recognize it ourselves. It’s because we’re scared that we can’t handle it. In my opinion, how are we supposed to know if we can handle it if we don’t even know what it is? We can’t.

When Minny is lying in her bed, praying to G-d that Leroy doesn’t start a fight with her, she thinks about her life and what has saved her from him. Why he hasn’t given her a hard enough blow to end it all. She realizes it’s her children, because that’s all Leroy has to leave in this world when he’s gone. And he wants to make sure he has enough of them. So Minny finally looks down at her stomach and tells herself why he isn’t beating her tonight; “because that’s the only thing that saved me, this baby in my belly. And that is the ugly truth” (413). It’s not easy for Minny to accept that a baby is what saves her from her own husband instead of their love, but as I wrote in my last post, that’s just the way it is. And that’s why Minny was able to kick Leroy out. She admitted to herself what she knew all along and accepted it. It made her stronger. And that’s what we sometimes have to learn. You can sugarcoat things, you can lie with all your might, but it doesn’t take the truth away no matter how ugly it may be.

The other part of this concept that Stockett shows us is that we have to sometimes acknowledge other people’s ugly truths, because we’re not the only ones who have them. When Aibileen is worried about the women finding out her and the maids and Skeeter wrote the book, she begins to realize that this book has made them free. If they get fired, at least they were able to write this book and free themselves from the guilt of not doing anything. They’d be “freer than Miss Leefolt, who so locked up in her own head she don’t even recognize herself when she read it” (444). And that’s the ugly truth that Aibileen realizes about Miss Leefolt; she’s oblivious and doesn’t even love her daughter enough to give her a hug good morning. Aibileen thought about the book and about her own ugly truth and moved on because she understood that everyone has their ugly truth and nothing would change that.

This becomes an issue with teenagers, because for the half of the day were not in school were sitting at our computers, locked up in our rooms, watching perfect actresses on TV, looking through the profile pictures of that gorgeous girl you wish you were or at the gorgeous boy you wish you had. It eats away at teenagers and we look in mirror and ask why we don’t have that. We internalize it and think it’s our own fault. It leads us to believe that we’re the only one who feels this way because everyone else is better and everyone else has something in their life and we have nothing. We forget to consider that someone else is doing the same thing we are. Stockett proves that there’s another person and many more doing the same thing we are and feeling the same things we are. In this book, she proves it by showing the town of Jackson that everyone has their own ugly truth.