The Help: Chapters 7–13

“Miss Phelan,” Elaine Stein said, and I knew it wasn’t a question, “this Negro actually agreed to talk to you candidly? About working for a white family? Because that seems like a hell of a risk in a place like Jackson, Mississippi.”

“I watched them try to integrate your bus station on the news,” Missus Stein continued. “They jammed fifty-five Negroes in a jail cell built for four.”

I stuttered a few unintelligible sounds, finally coming out with, “Thank you. Missus Stein, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

To think I know the color blue his eyes are from a black-and-white photograph. To consider something a chance that is nothing but paper and filament and postponed dinners.

My heat rash had flared in July and hadn’t subsided.

At three minutes to six, after doing twenty in a fifty with horns honking and teenagers hollering at me, I park down the street from Hilly’s house since Hilly’s cul-de-sac doesn’t provide adequate parking for farm equipment.

“I write a...domestic maintenance column for the Jackson Journal."
He wrinkles his brow, then laughs. “Domestic maintenance. You mean...housekeeping?”

“Sounds like a ploy to me, to find a husband. Becoming an expert on keeping house.”

It was Kiki Brown’s morning for cleaning and the whole church is gaudied up with her lemon smell-good she makes and tries to sell for twenty-five cents a bottle.

But she had the gall to ask if me and some a my maid friends might want a put down on paper what it’s like to tend for white people.

The Reverend laughs. He gets up and treads slowly to the pulpit.

I pick up Mister Johnny’s folded pants off the yellow ottoman.

“Now how’m I sposed to know if these is clean or dirty?” I stick them in the sack anyway. My motto on housekeeping: when in doubt, wash it out.

I tote the bag over to the bureau.

Daddy’s in a cotton-planting frenzy, had to hire ten extra field workers to till and drive tractors to get the seed in the ground.

I smile, wait for her to elucidate.

They’d charge us with integration violation—I read about it in the paper all the time—they despise the whites that meet with the coloreds to help with the civil rights movement.

Slowly the voices outside dissipate down the road.

The bridge table is set up in Hilly’s antebellum-style parlor with its deafening grandfather clock and gold swag curtains.

And when you’re not looking, she stares at you with that vapid, toothy smile. And she agrees with every single little thing Hilly says.

In Hilly’s parlor, a portrait of a Confederate general hangs eight feet tall. It is as prominent as if he were a grandfather and not a third cousin twice removed.

“Not that Trudy’s unattractive, but you’re the one with the poise and the real style.”

She’s tall, slender, almost regal-looking and has a much better figure than Hilly.

At eight o’clock that same night, I’m stumbling down Aibileen’s street as discreetly as one can carrying a fifty-pound Corona typewriter.

I follow this with Aibileen’s own stories, just as she wrote them, simple, straightforward.

Aibileen moves around the room in her easy, white-uniformed stride, not showing even a hint of what we’ve done. I guess she’s grown deft at hiding her feelings.

I try to concentrate on the game, but little facts keep jumping in my head every time I look at Elizabeth. About Mae Mobley using the garage bathroom, how Aibileen can’t keep her lunch in the Leefolts’ refrigerator. Small details I’m privy to now.

Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to colored people.

“This Sarah Ross. I like her stories. She likes to kvetch without complaining too much.”

Her skin is blacker than Aibileen’s by ten shades, and shiny and taut, like a pair of new patent shoes.

“What you think you gone change with this? What law you want to reform so it say you got to be nice to your maid?”

Slowly, warily, Minny settles again in her chair. “I do it. I just want a make sure she understand, this ain’t no game we playing here.”

“I got to go. You giving me the heart palpitations talking bout this.”

Don’t you remember anything from Missus Rheimer’s etiquette class? And just go ahead and lie and tell him you go to church every Sunday, and whatever you do, do not crunch your ice at the table, it’s awful.

I read through four of the twenty-five pages, mesmerized by how many laws exist to separate us.

Our places of comfort are expectedly different, my friends and I. Elizabeth’s is hunched over her sewing machine trying to make her life look seamless, store-bought. Mine is at my typewriter writing pithy things I’ll never have the guts to say out loud.

The meeting has not officially started, but Hilly’s already behind her podium.

In fact, my satchel holds all the work we’ve done—Aibileen’s and Minny’s interviews, the book outline, a list of potential maids, a scathing, unmailed response I wrote to Hilly’s bathroom initiative—everything I can’t leave at home for fear Mother will snoop through my things.

Just because this is a hospital doesn’t mean I’m an invalid.

But before I do, I wonder at how frail and inconsequential my mother has become. She used to fill a room by just breathing and now there seems to be...less of her.