‘The Help’ hits home for those who lived each side of complicated relationship

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 1, 2011

Calvin Turley and Addie Carr reflected on the themes explored in ”The Help,” the No. 1 box office movie in America.

Turley is white. Carr is black.

A movie and book of the same name, “The Help” explores the relationship between white families and African-American maids in the 1960s, when America’s views on civil rights had begun to change.

“The Help” tugs and pulls at the contrasts between the helpers, who often are considered part of a family, and the sometimes exploitive relationship in white households that employed the low-wage black maids.

“The Help” has become a national phenomenon and remains the top-grossing movie in the country this week. And in Memphis, the Malco Paradiso ranks as the top-grossing theater in the nation for the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

But for Turley and Carr it was just the way things were back then.

Turley, 61, is president of Turley Cotton Co. He has seen the movie and hopes to take Carr, who works for him and worked for his family before that, to see it soon.

His parents employed domestic help to work in the family’s Central Gardens home.

“I think pretty much everybody in that

neighborhood had family help, and it added a lot of texture to the neighborhood,” Turley said.

A long list of women did the cooking and cleaning and tending to the children. Turley ticks them off like naming old friends: Pearl cooked the best soul food he’s ever had, Crystal was the nurse, and Maggie Steele worked for three generations of Turleys … (read more)