My response to the book and movie, THE HELP.

These are two poems I wrote years ago but I was reminded of them after reading the novel, The Help, and then seeing the movie.  The novel did touch me but the movie settled.  It could have done so much MORE!  It kept to the safe laugh, hinted at the danger, and minimized the evil of racism.  I was a child a little older than Maybelle's age in the sixties but even I knew the dangers that hummed along the color lines.  Anyway, here are the poems.

Praying for Dr. King

            You wouldn’t think praying would be a scary thing to do, but I remember being scared to death this day Daddy prayed. 

            We bowed our heads and closed our eyes, but men began moving. I’d been taught not to look around during times of prayer and I kept to that rule not out of fear of doing something wrong but for the reverence of doing something right. With eyes still closed I knew something was wrong.  From all sides they came.  I felt the air they stirred as they brushed by me at my seat near the aisle.

            I knew what he had said up there in the pulpit, that we should all be in prayer for Dr. King lay dead and his followers were beside themselves with grief and that this was a day of prayer that although the leader had died for his message to live.  That was not what a white preacher in a small rural church on the Tennessee-Alabama border was supposed to be praying about in 1968.  I was only eight, but even I knew that.

            He prayed anyway as the people left and when I did open my eyes there were just a few of us left, mostly the women and the children.  My Daddy didn’t look surprised, or mad, or sad.  He looked like he always looked; that everything was going to be alright look.  Not safe but alright. It was a humble, contented, steady look.  One that let me know how serious the situation was, that he was prepared to go on whatever the cost and that decision included me whom he loved so dear, his only child. He preached his sermon, of which I remember not one word.  How we were treated on the way out, I have no recall.   Then we drove home.   In silence or conversation, I do not know. Oh, the men tried to move him from the church the next week and I remember my Mother saying they talked to him like a dog but she said he answered them like you would your Grandfather with all the respect and dignity he could muster but he never backed down and he never got angry. We waited, but no cattle truck came to our door to load our things.  

            My Daddy taught me a lesson that day in that church about what people really were, whether black or white, wrong or right, for you or against you.  It is not about them.  It is about you and how far you are prepared to go.  You are commanded by God to live with compassion, faith, strength, and humility and to speak for justice.  I learned that the day he prayed for Dr. King.