Excellent piece about Kathryn Stockett's past from before her book came out

This Life: Kathryn Stockett on her childhood in the Deep South

But it was later that she made the greatest impact on my life. When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, ‘You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.’ It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself.

It was probably the most intimate relationship I’ve ever had with someone who wasn’t related to me. 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.

Kathryn Stockett is two years younger than myself. Like me, she was raised in the South (and through a lot of my childhood I was also in the Deep South). But my folks weren't really well off enough to employ domestics, although my father had a black nanny for awhile when he was growing up. We were of the class that took pride in taking care of their own home, and my parents struggled when they were young and he was merely an airman and she an LPN in their twenties. Still, I moved in a mostly white world and don't really understand things from the 'other side', if you will.

But I've glimpsed a little of this life through others. It's so weird for me probably because instead of a Demetrie, I had television as my childhood companion, with all the 1970s peace and love and equality propaganda that was on at the time, something that had a far-reaching effect on my development. And when I learned racial differences, I learned the term black because it was associated with Black Power and a whole movement of leaving other names behind. I never quite got caught up in the African-American thing, just like my grandfather always called them coloured, not maliciously or anything, just because that's what he was familiar with. I knew a few black children in school, and played with them like any of the other children, but on base at least officially there weren't differences, and of course, I was in the protection of the Air Force for so much of the time. I don't know what life outside the base was like down in Louisiana, where I lived from the time I was 6 until I was 12. I do remember one of the boys I played with had a father who was retiring who was very upset they couldn't afford a house in a better part of Shreveport because the area was primarily black. I didn't understand it until I was older. I do remember being jealous because little black girls could do all sorts of things to their hair, and mine pretty much just came in short and long. I didn't find out till I was an adult how much they had to go through for those braids and pigtails. I've had several friends who were black or mixed lament about their hair, when I thought it was wonderful.

The most racist place I ever lived was not the South, nor even the Deep South, but in the Midwest, in Kansas, of all places. I lived in a small town where not one person was of another race, at least until a Vietnamese family finally came in and opened a restaurant right before I left. There were racist jokes told at school, and one of my teachers nipped that in the bud during class one day by explaining exactly what it was like to be living in Detroit, where she was from, during the race riots. And I admit is was odd to return to Kentucky where the world was not simply white. I felt ashamed that I was ill at ease with people who were no different than I except for the colour of their skin, and quickly acclimated again, but that brief two year period and the aftermath taught me the problems with isolation, with 'sticking to your own kind'. When I went off to UK, even though there was no official segregation, the fraternities and sororities were, largely, and blacks and whites ate in separate ends of the lunch room--with the whites having the more desirable booths and the blacks the less desirable old cafeteria tables. Really. That was in 1984, twenty years after the Civil Rights movement. I'm glad to say that now, and for the last decade or so, that seems to have changed. We're a much more plural and global society.

I've only just begun The Help and the characters are already springing to life and I definitely have my likes and dislikes. I feel like I'm looking into a world that was somehow parallel to my own, or maybe the right word is juxtaposed, really. What is good is that I think we've come a long way from those differences, and I'd like to think we see each other as people rather than as colours.