A Long Way From Equal

There's nothing like checking out a book from the new release section at the library to make you speed-read your way through a good book.

On Tuesday, I picked up Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" from my local library. I only had seven days to read it and I couldn't renew it online. Fortunately, it was only 444 pages and not 600-plus like the last novel ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson) that I read.

Also, fortunately for me, "The Help" was a fantastic book. It's set in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, which really isn't that far from most towns in Alabama in the early 1980s. I was born in Mobile in 1976 and moved to Fairhope two years later. Both towns are as far south as you can get in Alabama without drowning in Mobile Bay along the Gulf Coast. My mom moved my brother and I from Fairhope to San Diego a few months before I turned 10 years old.

I haven't been back to Fairhope since my grandmother died in 2001, but I have a lot of very vivid memories about the time when I lived in Alabama and the times that I've visited my former hometown and my dad's house in Remlap, a rural town in northern Alabama near Birmingham.

Stockett's book brought a lot of those memories rushing back, from the stifling humidity to the miles and miles of cotton fields lining the highways to the big white plantation homes that stand as monuments to the way things used to be -- the good, the bad and the very, very ugly.

After acknowledging her family, friends and editors at the end of her book, Stockett goes on to explain her pride and shame about her life in Mississippi. My family didn't have a black maid, at least not in my lifetime, and we never talked about race. But you could feel the tension in the air, the tension that hovers over everyone and keeps people "separate but equal" even when they attend the same schools and work in the same buildings.

I don't believe there was a single black family in my Fairhope neighborhood called Rosa Acres. If there was, the children did not play with me and my friends. I vaguely remember a few black students in my elementary school classes, but I don't recall one of them spending the night at my house or coming to any of my birthday parties or joining my Girl Scout troop. Somehow I knew that we just didn't do that without anyone ever specifically telling me so.

To be fair, I probably met just as many bigots living in the Midwest and Southern California as I did in Alabama. Racist people are everywhere.

I'd like to think that we've come a long way since the time Stockett wrote about in her book, but I don't think we have. The same economic, geographic and class separations exist as in the past, but the lines are blurring slowly over time.

It takes a book like "The Help" to show us just how far we've come and how much farther we have to go. After all, black people have only been able to sit where they want on a city bus for about 55 years, but we had slavery in the United States for three centuries.