Dearest Novel Group,
Penguin Group USA The cover of “The Help,” a novel by Kathryn Stockett.JACKSON, Miss. – There is “The Help” and then there is the help. And she is not happy.
Ablene Cooper, a 60-year-old woman who has long worked as a maid, has filed a lawsuit against Kathryn Stockett, the author of the best-selling novel, “The Help,” about black maids working for white families in Jackson in the 1960s.
In the complaint, Ms. Cooper argues that one of the book’s principal characters, Aibileen Clark, is an unauthorized appropriation of her name and image, which she finds emotionally distressing.
It is more complicated than that. For the past dozen years, Ms. Cooper has worked – and still works – for Ms. Stockett’s brother and sister-in-law.
“Ain’t too many Ablenes,” Ms. Cooper said at a law office after a day’s work at the Stocketts, for whom she has helped raise two children. Ms. Cooper also said she has her employers’ support in her legal quest.
“What she did, they said it was wrong,” Ms. Cooper said of the Stocketts, members of a prominent Jackson family. “They came to me and said, ‘Ms Abie, we love you, we support you,’ and they told me to do what I got to do.”
Several messages left for the Stocketts were not returned.
The lawsuit alleges that the author was “asked not to use the name and likeness of Ablene” before the book was published, though it does not specify who did the asking. Ms. Cooper said that Ms. Stockett, whose daughter she once babysat, has never approached her about the book.
Amy Einhorn, whose imprint at Penguin Group USA published the book, declined to discuss the suit in detail.
“This is a beautifully written work of fiction and we don’t think there is any basis to the legal claims,” she said in a statement. “We cannot comment further regarding ongoing litigation.”
There are few topics in the South more complicated and fraught than the one between white families and black women who raise their children and keep their houses clean. The South, and high society in particular, is governed in large part by what is left unsaid, and this is particularly true on the topics of race and family.
Ms. Stockett herself has acknowledged the risks of putting that into words, especially given that the book is mostly narrated by black women, and she is white.
She has also said that “The Help” was coolly received by some in her hometown.
“Not everybody in Jackson, Mississippi’s thrilled,” she told Katie Couric last year, acknowledging that a few “close family members” were so unhappy that they were not talking to her.
She describes the novel – “fiction, by and large,” she writes in an afterword – as written in the voice of her family’s maid, Demetrie, who died when Ms. Stockett was 16.
“I’m sure she did have a close relationship with Demetrie,” said Edward Sanders, one of Ms. Cooper’s lawyers. But he added: “the similarities with Ablene Cooper seem very striking.”
Among them, he said, is the fact that Ms. Cooper, like the character, is a black middle-aged woman with a gold tooth who is called “Aibee” by the white children she cares for.
Ms. Cooper and her lawyers point out that the character Aibileen’s grown son died five months before her white employers’ first child was born, a sequence that closely mirrors the death of one of Ms. Cooper’s grown sons from cancer, several months before the birth of the Stocketts’ first child.
Though the character of Aibileen is portrayed in a sympathetic, even saintly light, she endures the racial insults of the time, something that Ms. Cooper finds “embarrassing.”
Ms. Cooper is seeking damages of $75,000, an amount strategically chosen as it would prevent the case from being removed to federal court.
Experts say such suits are extremely difficult.
“We’re talking about a work of art,” said David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar with the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. “There are strong First Amendment protections.”
“The Help” was a breakout hit propelled by book groups and word-of-mouth, and received mostly strong reviews. A movie based on the book is scheduled for release later this year.
In addition to Aibileen, “The Help” is narrated by another black maid named Minny and a white, ambitious young woman nicknamed Skeeter, who decides to write a book based on interviews with maids about their work with the white families of Jackson.
The book within the book is non-fiction, but given the dangers of the South at the time, names are changed and identities obscured.
