The Help, Page 50

  please don’t let her see this. Don’t let her hear what Miss Hilly saying about me. Down the hal , the door opens and Mae Mobley walks out. She blinks at us and coughs.

  “Aibee, my froat hurts.”

  “I—I be right there, baby.”

  Mae Mobley coughs again and it sounds bad, like a dog barking, and I start for the hal , but Miss Hil y say, “Aibileen, you stay where you are,

  Elizabeth can take care of her kids.”

  Miss Leefolt look at Hil y like, Do I have to? But then she get up and trudge down the hal . She take Mae Mobley into Li’l Man’s room and

  shut the door. It’s just two of us left now, me and Miss Hil y.

  Miss Hil y lean back in her chair, say, “I won’t tolerate liars.”

  My head swimming. I want to set down. “I didn’t steal no silver, Miss Hil y.”

  “I’m not talking about silver,” she say, leaning forward. She hissing in a whisper so Miss Leefolt don’t hear her. “I’m talking about those things

  you wrote about Elizabeth. She has no idea Chapter Two is about her and I am too good of a friend to tel her. And maybe I can’t send you to jail for

  what you wrote about Elizabeth, but I can send you to jail for being a thief.”

  I ain’t going to no penitentiary. I ain’t, is al I can think.

  “And your friend, Minny? She’s got a nice surprise coming to her. I’m cal ing Johnny Foote and tel ing him he needs to fire her right now.”

  The room getting blurry. I’m shaking my head and my fists is clenching tighter.

  “I’m pretty darn close to Johnny Foote. He listens to what I—”

  “Miss Hilly. ” I say it loud and clear. She stops. I bet Miss Hil y ain’t been interrupted in ten years.

  I say, “I know something about you and don’t you forget that.”

  She narrow her eyes at me. But she don’t say nothing.

  “And from what I hear, they’s a lot a time to write a lot a letters in jail.” I’m trembling. My breath feel like fire. “Time to write to ever person in Jackson the truth about you. Plenty a time and the paper is free.”

  “Nobody would believe something you wrote, Nigra.”

  “I don’t know. I been told I’m a pretty good writer.”

  She fish her tongue out and touch that sore with it. Then she drop her eyes from mine.

  Before she can say anything else, the door flies open down the hal . Mae Mobley runs out in her nightie and she stop in front a me. She

  hiccupping and crying and her little nose is red as a rose. Her mama must a told her I’m leaving.

  God, I pray, tell me she didn’t repeat Miss Hilly’s lies.

  Baby Girl grab the skirt a my uniform and don’t let go. I touch my hand to her forehead and she burning with fever.

  “Baby, you need to get back in the bed.”

  “Noooo,” she bawls. “Don’t gooo, Aibee.”

  Miss Leefolt come out a the bedroom, frowning, holding Li’l Man.

  “Aibee!” he cal out, grinning.

  “Hey…Li’l Man,” I whisper. I’m so glad he don’t understand what’s going on. “Miss Leefolt, lemme take her in the kitchen and give her some

  medicine. Her fever is real high.”

  Miss Leefolt glance at Miss Hil y, but she just setting there with her arms crossed. “Alright, go on,” Miss Leefolt say.

  I take Baby Girl’s hot little hand and lead her into the kitchen. She bark out that scary cough again and I get the baby aspirin and the cough

  syrup. Just being in here with me, she calmed down some, but tears is stil running down her face.

  I put her up on the counter and crush up a little pink pil , mix it with some applesauce and feed her the spoonful. She swal ow it down and I

  know it hurts her. I smooth her hair back. That clump a bangs she cut off with her construction scissors is growing back sticking straight out. Miss

  Leefolt can’t hardly look at her lately.

  “Please don’t leave, Aibee,” she say, starting to cry again.

  “I got to, baby. I am so sorry.” And that’s when I start to cry. I don’t want to, it’s just gone make it worse for her, but I can’t stop.

  “Why? Why don’t you want to see me anymore? Are you going to take care of another little girl?” Her forehead is al wrinkled up, just like

  when her mama fuss at her. Law, I feel like my heart’s gone bleed to death.

  I take her face in my hands, feeling the scary heat coming off her cheeks. “No, baby, that’s not the reason. I don’t want a leave you, but…”

  How do I put this? I can’t tel her I’m fired, I don’t want her to blame her mama and make it worse between em. “It’s time for me to retire. You my last little girl,” I say, because this is the truth, it just ain’t by my own choosing.

  I let her cry a minute on my chest and then I take her face into my hands again. I take a deep breath and I tel her to do the same.

  “Baby Girl,” I say. “I need you to remember everthing I told you. Do you remember what I told you?”

  She stil crying steady, but the hiccups is gone. “To wipe my bottom good when I’m done?”

  “No, baby, the other. About what you are.”

  I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I

  see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. A flash from the future. She is tal and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And

  she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a ful -grown woman.

  And then she say it, just like I need her to. “You is kind,” she say, “you is smart. You is important.”

  “Oh Law. ” I hug her hot little body to me. I feel like she done just given me a gift. “Thank you, Baby Girl.”

  “You’re welcome,” she say, like I taught her to. But then she lay her head on my shoulder and we cry like that awhile, until Miss Leefolt come

  into the kitchen.

  “Aibileen,” Miss Leefolt say real quiet.

  “Miss Leefolt, are you…sure this what you…” Miss Hil y walk in behind her and glare at me. Miss Leefolt nods, looking real guilty.

  “I’m sorry, Aibileen. Hil y, if you want to…press charges, that’s up to you.”

  Miss Hil y sniff at me and say, “It’s not worth my time.”

  Miss Leefolt sigh like she relieved. For a second, our eyes meet and I can see that Miss Hil y was right. Miss Leefolt ain’t got no idea

  Chapter Two is her. Even if she had a hint of it, she’d never admit to herself that was her.

  I push back on Mae Mobley real gentle and she looks at me, then over at her mama through her sleepy, fever eyes. She look like she’s

  dreading the next fifteen years a her life, but she sighs, like she is just too tired to think about it. I put her down on her feet, give her a kiss on the forehead, but then she reaches out to me again. I have to back away.

  I go in the laundry room, get my coat and my pocketbook.

  I walk out the back door, to the terrible sound a Mae Mobley crying again. I start down the driveway, crying too, knowing how much I’m on

  miss Mae Mobley, praying her mama can show her more love. But at the same time feeling, in a way, that I’m free, like Minny. Freer than Miss

  Leefolt, who so locked up in her own head she don’t even recognize herself when she read it. And freer than Miss Hil y. That woman gone spend the

  rest a her life trying to convince people she didn’t eat that pie. I think about Yule May setting in jail. Cause Miss Hil y, she in her own jail, but with a lifelong term.

  I head down the hot sidewalk at eight thirty in the morning wondering what I’m on do with the rest a my day. The rest a my life. I am shaking

  and crying and a white lady walk by frowning at me. The paper gone pay me ten dol ars a week, and there’s the book money plus a little more

  coming. Stil , it ain’t enough for me to
live the rest a my life on. I ain’t gone be able to get no other job as a maid, not with Miss Leefolt and Miss Hil y cal ing me a thief. Mae Mobley was my last white baby. And here I just bought this new uniform.

  The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open. I stand at the bus stop like I been doing for forty-odd years. In thirty minutes, my whole life’s…

  done. Maybe I ought to keep writing, not just for the paper, but something else, about al the people I know and the things I seen and done. Maybe I

  ain’t too old to start over, I think and I laugh and cry at the same time at this. Cause just last night I thought I was finished with everthing new.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Amy Einhorn, my editor, without whom the sticky-note business would not be the success it is today. Amy, you are so wise. I am truly

  lucky to have worked with you.

  Thank you to: my agent, Susan Ramer, for taking a chance and being so patient with me; Alexandra Shel ey for her tenacious editing and

  diligent advice; The Jane Street Workshop for being such fine writers; Ruth Stockett, Tate Taylor, Brunson Green, Laura Foote, Octavia Spencer,

  Nicole Love, and Justine Story for reading and laughing, even at the parts that weren’t that funny. Thank you to Grandaddy, Sam, Barbara, and

  Robert Stockett for helping me remember the old Jackson days. And my deepest thanks to Keith Rogers and my dear Lila, for everything.

  Thank you to everyone at Putnam for their enthusiasm and hard work. I took liberties with time, using the song “The Times They Are A-

  Changin,’” even though it was not released until 1964, and Shake ’n Bake, which did not hit the shelves until 1965. The Jim Crow laws that appear

  in the book were abbreviated and taken from actual legislation that existed, at various times, across the South. Many thanks to Dorian Hastings and

  Elizabeth Wagner, the incredibly detailed copy editors, for pointing out these, my stubborn discrepancies, and helping me repair many others.

  Thank you to Susan Tucker, author of the book Telling Memories Among Southern Women, whose beautiful oral accounts of domestics

  and white employers took me back to a time and place that is long gone.

  Final y, my belated thanks to Demetrie McLorn, who carried us al out of the hospital wrapped in our baby blankets and spent her life feeding

  us, picking up after us, loving us, and, thank God, forgiving us.

  TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

  Kathryn Stockett, in her own words

  Our family maid, Demetrie, used to say picking cotton in Mississippi in the dead of summer is about the worst pastime there is, if you don’t count

  picking okra, another prickly, low-growing thing. Demetrie used to tel us al kinds of stories about picking cotton as a girl. She’d laugh and shake

  her finger at us, warning us against it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fal to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.

  “For days I picked and picked. And then I looked down and my skin had bubbled up. I showed my mama. None a us ever seen sunburn on a

  black person before. That was for white people!”

  I was too young to realize that what she was tel ing us wasn’t very funny. Demetrie was born in Lampkin, Mississippi, in 1927. It was a

  horrifying year to be born, just before the Depression set in. Right on time for a child to appreciate, in fine detail, what it felt like to be poor, colored, and female on a sharecropping farm.

  Demetrie came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty-eight. My father was fourteen, my uncle seven. Demetrie was stout

  and dark-skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Clyde. She wouldn’t answer me when I asked questions about him. But

  besides the subject of Clyde, she’d talk to us al day.

  And God, how I loved to talk to Demetrie. After school, I’d sit in my grandmother’s kitchen with her, listening to her stories and watching her

  mix up cakes and fry chicken. Her cooking was outstanding. It was something people discussed at length after they ate at my grandmother’s table.

  You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie’s caramel cake.

  But my older brother and sister and I weren’t al owed to bother Demetrie during her own lunch break. Grandmother would say, “Leave her

  alone now, let her eat, this is her time,” and I would stand in the kitchen doorway, itching to get back with her. Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest

  so she could finish her work, not to mention, white people didn’t sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

  That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even

  if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now.

  I didn’t pity Demetrie, though. There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house,

  cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own, and we felt like we were fil ing a void in her life. If

  anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us: my sister, Susan, my brother, Rob, and

  me.

  My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than the other kids were. Nobody got cross with me if Demetrie was nearby. She would

  stand me in front of the mirror and say, “You are beautiful. You a beautiful girl,” when clearly I was not. I wore glasses and had stringy brown hair. I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub. My mother was out of town a lot. Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around, and I felt left over.

  Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.

  MY PARENTS DIVORCED when I was six. Demetrie became even more important to me then. When my mother went on one of her frequent trips, Daddy put

  us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us. I’d cry and cry on Demetrie’s shoulder, missing my mother so bad I’d get a

  fever from it.

  By then, my sister and brother had, in a way, outgrown Demetrie. They’d sit around the motel penthouse playing poker, using bar straws as

  money, with the front desk staff.

  I remember watching them, jealous because they were older, and thinking one time, I am not a baby anymore. I don’t have to take up with

  Demetrie while the others play poker.

  So I got in the game and of course lost al my straws in about five minutes. And back I went onto Demetrie’s lap, acting put out, watching the

  others play. Yet after only a minute, my forehead was against her soft neck and she was rocking me like we were two people in a boat.

  “This where you belong. Here with me,” she said, and patted my hot leg. Her hands were always cool. I watched the older kids play cards,

  not caring as much that Mother was away again. I was where I belonged.

  THE RASH OF negative accounts about Mississippi, in the movies, in the papers, on television, have made us natives a wary, defensive bunch. We are

  ful of pride and shame, but mostly pride.

  Stil , I got out of there. I moved to New York City when I was twenty-four. I learned that the first question anyone asked anybody, in a town so

  transient, was “Where are you from?” And I’d say, “Mississippi.” And then I’d wait.

  To people who smiled and said, “I’ve heard it’s beautiful down there,” I’d say, “My hometown is number three in the nation for gang-related

  murders.” To people who said, “God, you must be glad to be out of that place,” I’d bristle and say, “What do you know? It’s beautiful down there.”

  Once, at a roof party, a drunk man from a rich white Metro North–train type of town asked me where I was from and I told him Mississippi.

  He sneered and said, “I am so sorry.”

&nbs
p; I nailed down his foot with the stiletto portion of my shoe and spent the next ten minutes quietly educating him on the where-from-abouts of

  Wil iam Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Wil iams, Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Henson, Faith Hil , James Earl Jones, and

  Craig Claiborne, the food editor and critic for The New York Times. I informed him that Mississippi hosted the first lung transplant and the first heart transplant and that the basis of the United States legal system was developed at the University of Mississippi.

  I was homesick and I’d been waiting for somebody like him.

  I wasn’t very genteel or ladylike, and the poor guy squirmed away and looked nervous for the rest of the party. But I couldn’t help it.

  Mississippi is like my mother. I am al owed to complain about her al I want, but God help the person who raises an il word about her around

  me, unless she is their mother too.

  I WROTE THE HELP while living in New York, which I think was easier than writing it in Mississippi, staring in the face of it al . The distance added perspective. In the middle of a whirring, fast city, it was a relief to let my thoughts turn slow and remember for a while.

  The Help is fiction, by and large. Stil , as I wrote it, I wondered an awful lot what my family would think of it, and what Demetrie would have thought too, even though she was long dead. I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.

  I was truly grateful to read Howel Raines’s Pulitzer Prize–winning article, “Grady’s Gift”:

  There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the

  unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it

  impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.

  I read that and I thought, How did he find a way to put it into such concise words? Here was the same slippery issue I’d been struggling with

  and couldn’t catch in my hands, like a wet fish. Mr. Raines managed to nail it down in a few sentences. I was glad to hear I was in the company of

  others in my struggle.

  Like my feelings for Mississippi, my feelings for The Help conflict greatly. Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I

  have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

  I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that

  there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or the time to portray.

  What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it real y felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especial y in the 1960s. I don’t think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to

  understand is vital to our humanity. In The Help there is one line that I truly prize: