The mother-daughter relationship can really influence our identities. Though there are billions of different relationships that are in this world today, the mother-daughter bond still is the strongest of all.
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Only on Eduzaurus. Download essay. Need help with writing assignment? Hire writer. Essay due? We'll write it for you! Any subject Min. Disclaimer This essay has been submitted by a student. The Help When we started this tour, they told me I'd be going to two cities, Jackson and Memphis, and 32 markets later, I'm still going.
Stockett's tale of a young white girl in s Mississippi who embarks on a dangerous project with two black women after her family maid disappears is one of the best-selling books of the summer. That was where she learned to write, she says, after a rather inauspicious beginning. Right as I was walking in the class the first day, I threw up.
I was so embarrassed, I turned back around and ran home. I wasn't 12 years old. I was But Stockett returned, and Yesho Atil's creative writing class gave her her start.
The surprises actually came with the white women I interviewed. I realize there's a tendency to idealize the past, but some of the women I spoke to, especially the middle-aged generation, just fell apart before they even started talking. They remembered so many details: She taught me to tell time; She taught me to iron a man's shirt before I got married; She taught me how to wait for the green light. They'd remember and sigh. After a while, I started to better understand what they were feeling.
I felt it too. It wasn't just that they missed these women so deeply. I think they wished they could tell them, one last time, thank you for everything. There was a sense that they hadn't thanked them enough. At first I wasn't nervous writing in the voice of Aibileen and Minny because I didn't think anybody would ever read the story except me. I wrote it because I wanted to go back to that place with Demetrie. I wanted to hear her voice again.
But when other people started reading it, I was very worried about what I'd written and the line I'd crossed. And the truth is, I'm still nervous. I'll never know what it really felt like to be in the shoes of those black women who worked in the white homes of the South during the 's and I hope no one thinks I presume to know that.
But I had to try. I wanted the story to be told. I hope I got some of it right. Aibileen is my favorite because she shares the gentleness of Demetrie. But Minny was the easiest to write because she's based on my friend, Octavia. I didn't know Octavia very well at the time I was writing, but I'd watched her mannerisms and listened to her stories at parties. She's an actress in Los Angeles and you can just imagine the look on her face when some skinny white girl came up and said to her "I've written a book and you're one of the main characters.
Skeeter was the hardest to write because she was constantly stepping across that line I was taught not to cross. Growing up, there was a hard and firm rule that you did not discuss issues of color. You changed the subject if someone brought it up and you changed the channel when it was on television. When our family took holidays on the coast, Demetrie was paid to come along. But there was only one bathtub, so Demetrie bathed in her clothes.
Not because anyone had told her to, but because that was her answer to a tricky situation. We were always fighting for her time, her games, her lap. But it was later that she made the greatest impact on my life. You are smart. You are important. And yet, as much as we loved Demetrie, she had a separate bathroom located on the outside of the house. I never once sat down to eat with her at the table. I never saw her — except the day she lay in her coffin — dressed in anything but that white uniform.
I am ashamed to admit that it took me 20 years to realise the irony of that relationship. I wonder, if Demetrie were still alive, how she would feel about the old rules. When would she have had the nerve to finally walk into my neighbourhood grocery store without her uniform on?
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