The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

I wonder how it would feel to spend your whole life trying to remember other people’s preferences on toast butter and starch amounts and sheet changing.

If your skin is too white, I’m told, you’ll never

But the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side is what surprises me. Most are invited to attend the white children’s weddings, but only if they’re in their uniforms. These things I know already, yet hearing them from colored mouths, it is as if I am hearing them for the first time.

I reckon her mean old mama never got her what she wanted when she little.

When Miss Leefolt come in with her new hairdo, Mae Mobley don’t even say hello, she run back to her room. Like she scared her mama can hear what’s going on inside her head.

I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it. I’d paid Pascagoula’s brothers twenty-five dollars each to put those junkyard pots onto Hilly’s lawn and they were scared, but willing to do it. I remember how dark the night had been. I remember feeling lucky that some old building had been gutted and there were so many toilets at the junkyard to choose from.

It’s more of a control thing than a real interest. She wants to know who’s walking

We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.

Sometimes, when I’m bored, I can’t help but think what my life would be like if I hadn’t written the book. Monday, I would’ve played bridge. And tomorrow night, I’d be going to the League meeting and turning in the newsletter. Then on Friday night, Stuart would take me to dinner and we’d stay out late and I’d be tired when I got up for my tennis game on Saturday. Tired and content and … frustrated.

“Law, Miss Hilly gone be here in five minutes. She better put that fire out fast.” It feel crazy that we rooting for her.

I get her a new plate. She study it, sniff real loud. Then she turn to Miss Leefolt and say, “You can’t even teach these people how to be clean.”

“Now you sit up at the counter cause you’re at the Woolworf’s and you’re colored. And you got to stay there no matter what I do or you go to jail.”

“Just do it.” And like mens do, Mister Raleigh Leefolt walk out the door where he don’t have to give nobody no explanation about nothing.

Minny don’t say things twice. When she do things, they done the first time.

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.

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.

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 full of pride and shame, but mostly pride.

“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.”

William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Henson, Faith Hill, 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.

Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.

In the middle of a whirring, fast city, it was a relief to let my thoughts turn slow and remember for a while.

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.

that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.