The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

there be Miss Skeeter in a red dress and red shoes, setting on my front steps like a bullhorn.

“I have an idea. Something I want to write about. But I need your help.”

The boys playing ball clear the street, stand on the side frozen, like it’s a funeral car passing by.

“And,” I felt compelled to continue, “everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.” Sweat dripped down my chest, blotting the front of my cotton blouse.

The name comes out flat, bitter as a bad pecan.

I am praying to the Lord and the devil on the side

Tree branches, power lines, porch awnings collapsed like they’d plumb given up. Outside’s been dunked in a shiny clear bucket of shellac.

The picture shows wall-to-wall shag carpet and low, streamlined sofas, egg-shaped chairs and televisions that look like flying saucers.

Shame ain’t black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.”

feel I’ve passed through a leaden gate of confidence.

I cringe, wondering what else I’ve said, never suspecting the help was listening or cared.

“These is white rules. I don’t know which ones you following and which ones you ain’t.” We look at each other a second. “I’m tired of the rules,” I say.

would they beat her the way they beat the colored boy who used the white bathroom?

have nightmares for the next fifteen hours straight.

I’ve had nothing to eat today except Mother’s sexual-correction tea and I feel nauseous, jumpy.

Elizabeth smiles like she’s talking to a child, although certainly not her own.

Then get going. Before this civil rights thing blows over.”

Her skin is blacker than Aibileen’s by ten shades, and shiny and taut, like a pair of new patent shoes.

“Look to me like you just writing life.” I stop my pencil. She’s right. I realize that’s just what I wanted to do. I tell her, “I hope so.”

Pictures of Carlton line the wall, taken up until about the day before yesterday. Pictures of me stop when I was twelve.

“What, she ran off with someone else?” “Shoot.” He drops his head down into his hands, mumbles, “That’d be a goddamn Mardi Gras party compared to what happened.”

I’ve never met anybody that said exactly what they were thinking. Not a woman, anyway.”

How I’d pulled away, somehow sure the kiss hadn’t been intended for me.

“I hope you write something really good. Something you believe in.”

Inside, it smells like grade school—boredom, paste, Lysoled vomit.

Susie poses by the giant brown machine like she’s on The Price Is Right television show.

I read through four of the twenty-five pages, mesmerized by how many laws exist to separate us.

We all know about these laws, we live here, but we don’t talk about them. This is the first time I’ve ever seen them written down.

Number forty-seven I have to read twice, for its irony. The Board shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the instruction of all blind persons of the colored race.

I realize, like a shell cracking open in my head,

It’s going to be hard for her to trust an entire town to operate properly without her here.

teeters off, flat-faced, brainwashed-looking. “I guess you know best.” It is this bug-eyed effect Hilly has on people that makes her such a successful League president.

The white spotlight of wonder follows me

Hilly’s smile is a fat child’s at the Seale-Lily Ice Cream window. The button on her red suitcoat bulges.

what’s worse, the wrath of Mother or the wrath of Hilly?

feeling less pink now and more of a pale yellow.

By the grace of a god I never really liked, much less believed in,

hence the noncapitalization?

She used to fill a room by just breathing and now there seems to be…less of her.

It is the first moment that will tell me everything. Hilly is an exceptional liar, except for the moment right before she speaks.

Minny don’t stop sweating but for five minutes in January and maybe not even then.

Mississippi got the most unorganized weather in the nation. In February, it’ll be fifteen degrees and you be wishing spring would come on, and the next day it’s ninety degrees for the next nine months.

She pretty much just a short version a Miss Hilly, only it look better on a child.

She look at Miss Hilly like she looking up at the Statue a Liberty. That kind a love always make me want a cry. Even when it going to Miss Hilly.

what I really want to do is put my hands up over her ears so she can’t hear this talk. And worse, hear me agreeing. But then I think: Why? Why I have to stand here and agree with her? And if Mae Mobley gone hear it, she gone hear some sense. I get my breath. My heart beating hard. And I say polite as I can, “Not a school full a just white people. But where the colored and the white folks is together.”

She back to her low-down talk with Miss Leefolt. Out a nowhere, a big heavy cloud cover the sun. I spec we about to get a shower. “…government knows best and if Skeeter thinks she’s going to get away with this colored non—”

It always takes a while till they feel like mine. When Treelore was a little thing, I put on a old coat from some lady I’s waiting on and Treelore, he look at me funny, back away. Say I smell white.

they all got the letters H.W.H. sewn in. Red thread, pretty little cursive letters. I reckon Yule May had to sew them letters. Wearing those, I’d feel like I’s personal-owned property a Hilly W. Holbrook.

Miss Hilly wouldn’t pull no pistol on me. Miss Leefolt wouldn’t come burn my house down. No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches’ fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.

She don’t do that kind a thing herself. But while the nightmare’s happening, the burning or the cutting or the beating, you realize something you known all your life: the white lady don’t ever forget. And she ain’t gone stop till you dead.

I’m getting so peckertated over this cupcake talk I want to poke Miss Skeeter with my raw-chicken finger