Page 81 - Knighted_Issue2.0

It is Skeeter's journey to find out the truth about Constantine's departure that reveals this very
skewed relationship of black domestic help and the white children they care for.

It is in Aibileen who we see the archetype of mammy displayed the most, along with the
skewed relationship between Black maids and white children. Skeeter asks her early on, at the
beginning of the film, how it feels to care for white children while someone else is looking after
her own children--Aibileen is unable to give her an answer. Yet, we see throughout the film how
much love and attention Aibileen gives to her young white charge, Mae Mobley; which
manifests due to the lack of her own mother's show of love. Mae Mobley becomes very attached
to Aibileen and the love she receives from her, even going so far as to tell Aibileen that she is her
real mother. Which is something that happened often between a mammy and the white children
she cared for, and it is seen in Skeeter's relationship with Constantine--who she says particularly
raised her. That care and affection shown toward white children from Black maids is the
hallmark of the mammy archetype, as Kimberly Wallace-Sanders points out in her book Mammy,
"First as slave, then as a free woman, the mammy is largely associated with the care of white
children or depicted with noticeable attachment to white children" (6). No character in The Help
is associated with that more than Aibileen.

Yet, it is Aibileen's own personal trauma of losing her son, due to the neglect of white
people, that makes her care of Mae Mobley so much more painful to see. She carries that trauma
inside her, a bitter seed she calls it, and pretends as if nothing is wrong while she serves her
white employer along with her friends at a bridge party. "Anniversary of his death, every year I
can’t breathe. But to you all it’s just another day of bridge," are Aibileen's words to Skeeter and
they show how the mammy archetype and narrative has almost dehumanized these women
because their pain is secondary to their duties. Elizabeth, Aibileen's employer, would likely