The Help: Chapters 14–21

Then she give me a real perplexed look, say, “Aibileen, you like having your own toilet, don’t you?”

“Look, I found that paraphernalia of yours.”

Course we got plenty a smart people in our church with they college degrees. Doctors, lawyers, Mr. Cross who own the Southern Times, the colored newspaper that come out ever week. But Yule May, she probably the most educated maid we got in our parish.

“But I’ll get all flustered with those girls over here trying to teach me. Won’t you just show me a little?”

“But why? I don’t want to eat in there all by myself when I could eat in here with you,” Miss Celia said. I didn’t even try to explain it to her. There are so many things Miss Celia is just plain ignorant about.

I glance over from the stove and see the sit-in at Brown’s Drug Store is the front-page news. It’s not Shirley’s group, it’s people from Greenwood. A bunch of white teenagers stand behind the five protesters on their stools, jeering and jabbing, pouring ketchup and mustard and salt all over their heads.

She’s got the hair dryer on the back tank and the hood pulled over her bleached head. With that contraption on she wouldn’t hear the A-bomb explode.

The pale yellow bolster pillow is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, packaged on the ends like a big yellow hotdog.

And so, as July wanes on, I am forced from my attic bedroom to a cot on the screened back porch.

I stare at my typewriter with nothing to do, nothing to write. Minny’s stories are finished and typed already. It’s a wretched feeling.

They stand a moment, dead-faced, stupefied.

Elizabeth would be mortified by the thought of sharing a room with a man before she was married, Hilly would tell me I was stupid to even consider it.

Stuart’s eyes hang on mine while Mother waxes on about the heat, how Carlton’s finally met “the one.”

Not to have to endure the look in Raleigh Leefolt’s eyes when he sees that I’m tagging along again. The sullen daze when he has to carry my coat with Elizabeth’s, fetch me a drink too.

I need to know what constitutes breaking up forever. I need to know how many rules you can break before you’re thrown out, and what those rules even are in the first place.

I told her last June how I liked my coffee black and toast barely buttered and she never had to ask again. She's like Constantine that way, never forgetting things for us. It makes me wonder how many white women’s breakfasts she has ingrained in her brain.

I let my body sink deep into the thin mattress, against the springs. My feet dangle off the end, dance nervously, relishing relief for the first time in months.

Hilly had it appraised a few years ago and found out it wasn’t even a ruby, just a garnet, hardly worth anything.

“But everbody saying the judge wife be good friends with Miss Holbrook and how a regular sentence be six months for petty stealing, but Miss Holbrook, she get it pushed up to four years. That trial was done fore it even started.”

The door opens and a Negro man stands there looking at me, his white clerical collar gleaming. I hear Aibileen say, “It’s okay, Reverend.”

She’s still in her white uniform and white orthopedic shoes.

People begin to stir, telling each other good night with solemn nods.

My relief is bitter, that it took Yule May’s internment to bring us to this.

Alice, Fanny Amos, and Winnie are shy, need coaxing, keep their eyes down to their laps.

But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me.

But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me.

My nervousness rises like a trill in my throat as I realize, she knows.

I stand, frozen by how duplicitous my life has become.

We move into a formal living room with ornate molding and green velvet settees, so full of heavy furniture I can hardly see the floor.

She is ten years younger than my mother but looks older, especially now as her face turns long and prudish.

For the next fifteen minutes, I follow Mother and Missus Whitworth from one ostentatious room to the next.

Around the room, the wainscoting panels have been painted to depict scenes of pre-Civil War times, happy Negroes picking cotton, horses pulling wagons, white-bearded statesmen on the steps of our capitol.

I look at Stuart to gauge his reaction to this. I’ve never asked him his position on civil rights.

For a second, I swear, I see it in Mother’s eyes too, beneath her worry that Daddy has obliterated my future.

If this damaged him so much, and he can’t even speak to me about it, then what am I to him? Just a diversion? Something sitting beside him to keep him from thinking about what’s really tearing him up inside?

I watch a few tendrils of Mother’s hair lift gently into the air.

“He’s just traveling is all, Mama.”
This seems to placate her for the moment and I tell the same story to Elizabeth, with a few more details to Hilly, pinching my arm to bear her insipid smile.

This seems to placate her for the moment and I tell the same story to Elizabeth, with a few more details to Hilly, pinching my arm to bear her insipid smile.

Some head out, eager to attend to their husbands. Others dawdle, the ones with a kitchen full of kids and help that has gone home.

I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she’ll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town. But I get a better idea. “I’m going to call up Genevieve right now. I’m going to tell her what a hypocrite you are.”