The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did.

A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore.

I don’t hate much in life, but me and that dress is not on good terms.

you never think she go and leave her baby crying in her crib like that. But the help always know.

We start calling his daddy Crisco cause you can’t fancy up a man done run off on his family. Plus he the greasiest no-count you ever known.

Minny don’t like nobody talking bad about her white lady except herself. That’s her job and she own the rights.

I rock and soothe, rock and soothe. But Baby Girl, she just cry and cry.

“You’re the smartest one in the class, Aibileen,” she say. “And the only way you’re going to keep sharp is to read and write every day.” So I started writing my prayers down instead a saying em. But nobody’s called me smart since.

Cause that’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.

Hearing this made me think about how I didn’t even get the chance to pray for Treelore. Maybe that’s why God took him so fast. He didn’t want a have to argue with me.

They just think you got a better connection than most. We all on a party line to God, but you, you setting right in his ear.”

feel nothing but delight at the devil in me. I am lying and I don’t even care.

I put the iron down real slow, feel that bitter seed grow in my chest, the one planted after Treelore died. My face goes hot, my tongue twitchy. I don’t know what to say to her. All I know is, I ain’t saying it. And I know she ain’t saying what she want a say either and it’s a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.

Shoot, now I’m wondering if this fool even plans on hiring a maid or if she just drug me all the way out here for sport.

Maybe she’s not deaf or crazy. Maybe she’s just stupid. A shiny hope rises up in me again.

I have finally gotten myself a job. I don’t have to move to the North Pole. Won’t Santy Claus be disappointed.

“You ain’t taking my car every day, woman, what if I get the day shift and need to—” “She paying me seventy dollars cash every Friday, Leroy.” “Maybe I take Sugar’s bike.”

She’s wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker.

Lord. I’ve never met a white person worse off than me except for crazy Mister Wally, lives behind the Canton feed store and eats the cat food.

I leave it at that. Underneath all that happy, she sure doesn’t look happy.

Mrs. Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.

I was five-foot-eleven but I had twenty-five thousand cotton dollars in my name and if the beauty in that was not apparent then, by God, he wasn’t smart enough to be in the family anyway.

“Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?”

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.” Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. “You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?”

All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

I had to accept that Constantine, my one true ally, had left me to fend for myself with these people.

I hate that my friends have discussed this, my one night’s fate, behind my back. I hate it and I love it too.

She just look at me. She two years old. She don’t know what she is yet.

“I did not raise you to use the colored bathroom!” I hear her hiss-whispering, thinking I can’t hear, and I think, Lady, you didn’t raise your child at all.

“She telling everybody she lost forty pounds,” I say. “Lord a mercy.” “Only got two hundred more to go.”

FOR NO REASON but to irritate me, we get a heat wave in December.

the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I’m starting to think it’s all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun.

Mother’s been trembling, torn between the terror that I’ll screw it up and glee that I actually like men.

the white lady don’t ever forget. And she ain’t gone stop till you dead.

There’s not even a we now. Now it’s will you do it. Will you fish my dead baby out of that toilet bowl. And what choice do I have?

“Valium” they’re calling it, “to help women cope with everyday challenges.” God, I could use about ten of those little pills right now.

“All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”

“Call me on the phone if he gets rough. You hear me?” “I don’t need no phone. You’ll hear him screaming for mercy all the way over here.”

I knew she was stupid, but I never knew she was a hypocrite.

she’s got stockings dangling from chairs, pocketbooks on the floor, enough costume jewelry for a whole family of hookers, forty-five pairs of high-heel shoes, underthings, overcoats, panties, brassieres, and a half-empty bottle of white wine on the chifforobe with no coaster under it.

Hang on, I think, my eyes opening wide. Miss Celia can’t leave Mister Johnny—where in the heck would that leave me?

I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.

“Don’t you let him cheapen you.”

Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.

“If Stuart doesn’t know how intelligent and kind I raised you to be, he can march straight on back to State Street.”

“Frankly, I don’t care much for Stuart. He doesn’t know how lucky...

“They say it’s like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime.”