The Help

After watching the movie "The Help" at the E.L.T Vocabulary lesson, the teacher asked us to write an informal letter using information from the film. The assignment was the following:

You are Skeeter. You are writing to a very close friend of yours in New York. You are shocked about some stories you've heard from the American house helds.
Write a letter about telling your friend some of the stories you've learnt from them.

The following is the letter I wrote:

Dear Emma,

How are you? I’m really sorry I haven’t been in touch these days, but I’m going through some tough stuff here at home.

I’m writing you because I need some advice. As you know, I’ve been writing a column for a newspaper. I try to be a normal person here and get on well with my old friends here but is being hard. The problem is that my old friends have a particular way of thinking about black people, and with particular I mean discriminatory. Can you believe they don’t even share the house toilet because they believe black people carry other type of diseases? Most of the white American families have two bathrooms, one for the domestic worker and one for them, unbelievable! These people are heartless, I swear. They don’t even matter on their domestic workers life, which is very hard. For example, one domestic worker asked a woman I know if she could give her a salary advance as a loan since he needed it for his son’s University. Can you believe that she denied to? As I told you, they don’t have compassion.

Besides all these stories, this problem is even bigger since the racism comes from the Mississippi Law Book itself. So as you can get an idea of what I’m talking about, there is a law that says “Anyone who writes or print any paper encouraging the social equality between black and white people will be imprisoned”. It is unthinkable!

I’m honestly not sure if I can stand this for longer. I just go on to make justice for all these innocent people that have to live under these repugnant laws. I need your advice, your point of view.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Lots of love, Skeeter.