I'm excited to be back in the classroom in the spring and particularly excited to be teaching trusts and estates. As I've been pulling my course together -- and dusting off a lot of notes about the Alabama probate code -- I have been thinking back to the movie The Help. I want to use a vignette from The Help about a testator who "devised" her domestic servant to one of her children. (How is it possible that movie came out six years ago?!) Here's the excerpt from the screen play with the vignette that Cora tells about her relationship with her employer and her employer's daughter:
I worked for Miss Jolene's mother 'til the day she died. Then her daughter, Miss Nancy, asked me to come and work for her. Miss Nancy's a real sweet lady. But Miss Jolene's ma done put it in her will I got to work for Miss Jolene. Miss Jolene's a mean woman. Mean for sport. Lord, I tried to find another job. But in everybody's mind the French family and Miss Jolene owned me. Owned me.
And then the vignette comes up again near the end of the movie when several young women are trying to figure out if the book is based on their lives. One woman says, "And, Jolene, didn't your momma leave Cora to you in her will?" To which Jolene responds that, "Well, yes...But that's not odd, is it? Happens all the time, right?" Well, there you have it, testimony that this might have happened with some frequency!
I've got a friend in Jackson searching for an actual example of such a will -- but for the spring I may just talk about this as one of many expressive statements that testators put into wills. We'll see if an actual example ever turns up. Still, you never know what you'll find in courthouses....
I don't see that vignette in Kathyrn Stockett's the novel The Help. Yet, there is much law in the novel. For instance, Skeeter reads a pamphlet "Compilation of the Jim Crow Laws of the South." What I'm not sure is whether the pamphlet was designed originally to critique Jim Crow--though I suspect it was. (And maybe along the lines of James Chadbourn's Lynching and the Law.) In particular, though, I am intrigued by this: one of the women that Skeeter interviews asks about what law reform she thinks might be useful. It is, actually, a question designed to show that reform is unlikely to be effective. As in, "what kind of law could possibly work to improve my life?" That question captures the sense of the limits of law. There is, though, another exchange that blurs the line between law and culture (much as the vignette about Cora being devised to Miss Jolene does) -- it is where one of the women tells Skeeter that "Half this stuff don't have nothing to do with colored rights. ... Look to me like you just writing life." This is strangely reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle's essay "On History," where he talks about law as the stage on which we act. It is also an important reminder that law and life blur together -- as the recent excellent literature on the law of social movements also makes clear. That is, while Skeeter is looking at Jim Crow laws and trying to write a sociological analysis of domestic workers she's learning that law and social norms blend together. For the women she is writing about, there are not distinct boxes of Jim Crow law and treatment by employers.
You can check out those vignettes here.
Obviously I'd love any advice readers have on where to locate such a will -- or one like it. Maybe a trip over to the Jackson probate office is in order. I'm always pleasantly surprised by my trips to probate clerks. You never know what cool wills you'll find.
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