North Carolina Miscellany
book, also produces a runaway bestseller. The popularity of The Help is undeniable. It has been perched atop the New York Times bestseller list, either in hardback or paperback, for nearly two years now, having sold over three million copies, and has already been adapted to the screen; it has over 4600 customer reviews on Amazon.com. However, despite the popularity of the novel, the degree to which Stockett successfully negotiates the “tricky subject” Howell Raines speaks of is debatable. The book and its author have received heavy criticism for the use of haphazard first-person black dialect, for trafficking in stereotypes in both the black and white characters, for overly comedic plotting, for historical inaccuracies, and for a tidy ending
in which the white heroine gets to run off to New York to work for a famous publisher while the maids are left to contend with the situation in Mississippi. Some of the reviews of The Dry Grass of August make direct comparisons to The Help. Most notably, though not a “highbrow” publication but one with a massive readership, Woman’s World noted that Mayhew’s book is “a must-read for fans of The Help.”3 I would agree. While as I have noted, Mayhew is at times on rocky ground with her subject matter and her portrayal of Mary, The Dry Grass of August is a superior book to The Help, even if it doesn’t sell three million copies. It should instead join the ranks of other white writers’ works that examine black/white
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domestic relations during the civil rights era: Ellen Douglas’s novel Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988); the oral history collection by Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and their Employers in the Segregated South (1988); the film The Long Walk Home (1990); the television series I’ll Fly Away (1991–93); more recently, the narrative poem cycle Cradle Song (2009) by Stacey Lynn Brown; and Southern literary scholar Minrose Gwin’s stunning debut novel, The Queen of Palmyra (2010) – all works that offer a more nuanced view of this complicated, troublesome time in the notso-distant past, when it was debatable that “dreams of the Good” would – or could – prevail over the “killers of the dream.” n
2011 Ragan Old North State Award excerpted from the presentation remarks by James W. Clark, Jr. North Carolina Literary and Historical Association Meeting Raleigh, NC, 18 November 2011 PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN WESTMORELAND; COURTESY OF NC STATE ARCHIVES
The winner of the Ragan Old North State Award for nonfiction this year is It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path To Peace (Bloomsbury, 2011). Beginning in childhood, the book’s author, Rye Barcott, had viewed himself as someone destined to be short-lived, but someone who always felt a special responsibility to live compassionately. In his committed rush through undergraduate school, he co-founded Carolina for Kibera, a participatory youth leadership development program in the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. After graduating with a military commission in 2001, young Barcott led Marines in dangerous theaters of modern war and simultaneously performed collaborative humanitarian services in East Africa. n
ABOVE Rye Barcott receives the 2011 Ragan Award from James 3
Woman’s World 16 May 2011: 6.
Clark at the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association meeting, Raleigh, 18 Nov. 2011