The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

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

Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” Miss Hilly say. “As a disease-preventative measure.”

“A bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help.

But the colored part a town, we one big anthill, surrounded by state land that ain’t for sale. As our numbers get bigger, we can’t spread out. Our part a town just gets thicker.

I look down at Baby Girl, who I know, deep down, I can’t keep from turning out like her mama.

“So, from now on, instead of using the guest bathroom, you can use your own right out there. Won’t that be nice?”

I’ve never in my life had a white woman tell me to sit down so she can serve me a cold drink.

A burned-up Confederate flag is framed on the wall, and on the table is an old silver pistol with the name “Confederate General John Foote” engraved on it. I bet Great-Grandaddy Foote scared some slaves with that thing.

“Be nice to the little colored girls when you’re down there,” Mother said to me one time and I remember looking at her funny, saying, “Why wouldn’t I be?” But Mother never explained.

“You cannot leave a Negro and a Nigra together unchaperoned,” Mother’d whispered to me, a long time ago. “It’s not their fault, they just can’t help it.”

I hadn’t thought of Aibileen as a reader before.

Cause besides her own mother, there ain’t nothing Miss Leefolt scared of more than Negro diseases.

“Aibileen,” Hilly continued, “how do you like your new bathroom out there? It’s nice to have a place of your own, now isn’t it?”

“You know colored folks ain’t allowed in that library.”

Pascagoula seems afraid of me anyway, like I might tell on her if she does something wrong. It could take years to break through that fear.

“Oh, Minny,” she cat-calls, “you the best help we ever had. Big Minny, we gone keep you on forever. Then one day she say she gone give me a week a paid vacation. I ain’t had no vacation, paid or unpaid, in my entire life. And when I pull up a week later to go back to work, they gone. Moved to Mobile. She tell somebody she scared I’d find new work before she move. Miss Lazy Fingers couldn’t go a day without having a maid waiting on her.”

person shall require any white female to nurse in wards or rooms in which negro men are placed. It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void. No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls. The officer in charge shall not bury any colored persons upon ground used for the burial of white persons. Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.

Negroes and whites are not allowed to share water fountains, movie houses, public restrooms, ballparks, phone booths, circus shows. Negroes cannot use the same pharmacy or buy postage stamps at the same window as me.

“Separate but equal,” Miss Hilly say back to Miss Leefolt. “That’s what Governor Ross Barnett says is right, and you can’t argue with the government.”

“You know well as I do, there are good, tax-paying white people in this town who would fight you to the death on this. You want to let them get in our swimming pools? Let them put their hands on everything in our grocery stores?”

If your skin is too white, I’m told, you’ll never get hired. The blacker the better.

I’d cry, if only I had the time to do it.