The Help

Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, told in the voices of two Black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and Skeeter, a young white woman who secretly collects their accounts of working in white households. The city is real and its divisions are geographic: the white families in the leafy streets of Belhaven, the maids' own neighbourhood over by Farish Street, the segregated downtown, and the Phelan cotton farm out past the edge of town.

Aibileen Clark

Belhaven (the Leefolt house)

Aibileen

Aibileen keeps house and raises the neglected toddler Mae Mobley for the young Leefolt family in Belhaven, the seventeenth white child she has brought up. The comfortable street, with its bridge parties and its separate bathroom built for the maid, is where the whole quiet rebellion of the book begins.

Aibileen's chapters

inferred Belhaven is the real historic neighbourhood of large houses just north-east of downtown Jackson where the book's white families live; the individual homes, like Elizabeth Leefolt's, are invented and sited within it.

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Aibileen Clark

Aibileen's neighbourhood, near Farish Street

Aibileen

In the evenings the maids return to their own community, centred on the once-thriving Black business district of Farish Street. It is here, in Aibileen's kitchen and at church, that the women meet in secret to tell their stories for Skeeter's book, at real risk to their livelihoods and safety.

Aibileen's chapters

inferred Aibileen and Minny live across town from their employers, in Jackson's historically Black neighbourhood around the Farish Street district; the specific houses are invented and sited there.

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