As an African-American women growing up in the North, this book spoke to me. Most vivid to me was the bag of clothes sitting in Aibileen's living room. She didn't want the castoffs but had to accept them nonetheless. I can remember my grandmother lugging home bags of cast-offs from her job. But like Aibileen, I don't remember her ever wearing any of those clothes! The story that Stockett tells in the voice of the South could easily have been transplanted to New York or Boston with the "help" being from Jamaica or Barbados or Trinidad.