The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

meaning something you can’t dress up no matter how you try.

“Don’t you want to get some tissue and go on out there and use it?”

Wtf. Like its a new toy.

“Leroy, she got to be crazy,”

Im dead lol

“Rule Number One for working for a white lady, Minny: it is nobody’s business. You keep your nose out of your White Lady’s problems, you don’t go crying to her with yours—you can’t pay the light bill? Your feet are too sore? Remember one thing: white people are not your friends. They don’t want to hear about it. And when Miss White Lady catches her man with the lady next door, you keep out of it, you hear me? “Rule Number Two: don’t you ever let that White Lady find you sitting on her toilet. I don’t care if you’ve got to go so bad it’s coming out of your hairbraids. If there’s not one out back for the help, you find yourself a time when she’s not there in a bathroom she doesn’t use. “Rule Number Three—” Mama jerked my chin back around to face her because that cake had lured me in again. “Rule Number Three: when you’re cooking white people’s food, you taste it with a different spoon. You put that spoon to your mouth, think nobody’s looking, put it back in the pot, might as well throw it out. “Rule Number Four: You use the same cup, same fork, same plate every day. Keep it in a separate cupboard and tell that white woman that’s the one you’ll use from here on out. “Rule Number Five: you eat in the kitchen. “Rule Number Six: you don’t hit on her children. White people like to do their own spanking.” “Rule Number Seven: this is the last one, Minny. Are you listening to me? No sass-mouthing.”

Underneath all that happy, she sure doesn’t look happy.

Trim, young secretary wanted. Typing not nec. Call Mr. Sanders. Jesus, if he doesn’t want her to type, what does he want her to do?

HELP WANTED: MALE. There are at least four columns filled with bank managers, accountants, loan officers, cotton collate operators. On this side of the page, Percy & Gray, LP, is offering Jr. Stenographers fifty cents more an hour.

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

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.

Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.

“You’re peculiarly tall but I’d think a pretty girl like you’d be dating the whole goddamn basketball team.”

“What then? Eight’s not enough? Jesus, woman, go clean your husband’s toilet for free.”

“A start at what? Giving advice on how to keep up a home when…” She sighs again, long and slow like a deflating tire. I look away, wondering if everyone in town will be thinking the same thing. Already the joy is fleeting.

Nah, cause this hurt my heart for her

“This is dirty out here, Mae Mobley. You’ll catch diseases! No no no!” And I hear her pop her again and again on her bare legs.

This hurts my heart for poor Mae Mobley

I don’t talk to my maid friends. I see Baby Girl getting spanked cause a me. I see her listening to Miss Leefolt call me dirty, diseased.

on a Saturday night talking to Aibileen in her regular clothes? Would they call the police, to report a suspicious meeting? I’m suddenly sure they would. We’d be arrested because that is what they do. 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.

I know how to make the teapot stop rattling.

Celia—“She sneaking upstairs, think I don’t see her, but I know, that crazy lady up to something”—she always stops herself, the way Aibileen does when she speaks of Constantine. “That ain’t part a my story. You leave Miss Celia out a this.”

Inside, someone has written NIGGER BOOK in purple crayon. I am not as disturbed by the words as by the fact that the handwriting looks like a third grader’s.

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

“I think we ought to quit for a while,” he whispers.

Omggggg

At first, I thought Leroy had found out about my working with Miss Skeeter. It was the only reason I could come up with while he was beating me with his hand. But he didn’t say a thing about it. He was just beating me for the pure pleasure of it.

That's so sad.

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

That’s what I love about Aibileen, she can take the most complicated things in life and wrap them up so small and simple, they’ll fit right in your pocket.

That’s when I see Miss Hilly’s note tucked underneath it and Miss Celia’s check for two hundred dollars. I look a little closer. Along the bottom of the check, in the little space for the notes, Miss Celia’s written the words in pretty cursive handwriting: For Two-Slice Hilly.

Im fucking deadddddd lmao omg i love her

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

I will tell her to her face she deserved that pie and more.”

“Miss Taylor did.”

Thats one smart kid