It turns the whole white woman saving the help thing from The Help on its head.
That’s one of the wonderful things about this book. She told them when they had to be out of the way, when she would work, and when she wouldn’t.
She ordered her employers’ lives, not the other way around. For all the chatelaine fantasies of some of the women for whom she worked, she was really her own boss, and her clients knew it. I think Blanche’s personality is best summed-up here: She is not someone who needs OR wants a white woman (or man) to come along and rescue her.
Yet facing all of those odds, Blanche remains determined and strong. Blanche faces: police and criminal justice prejudice, stinginess on the part of wealthy employers, rape at the hands of a white male employer, classism, employers’ racist attempts to control her body, non-traditional family structure, and much much more. Somehow this tiny mystery novel (called a Kriminalroman in German, which I think sounds much better) manages to cover pretty much every aspect of black female domestic workers’ lives that we’ve discussed throughout the project. And what a book! If I had to pick one of the fiction books we read to hand to fans of The Help to get a much more real representation of black women in domestic service, this is definitely the book I would hand them. It’s hard to believe Amy and I are on our penultimate book for the project, not to mention the final fiction book on the list. Naturally, things can never be simple, and Blanche starts to suspect one of the family members is a murderer. She’s going to be the help for a family on a week-long vacation in the countryside. She decides to take a temporary job she had originally decided against as a way to hide out. She had no idea that bouncing a few checks would land her with a 30 day jail sentence, though, so when she gets the chance, Blanche goes on the lam. Blanche’s employers failed to pay her on time, and now she has some bad checks.
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