The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

like them eerie seconds before a funnel cloud drop.

everthing I been writing and still have to write ain’t gone get to be said. No, I think. I don’t want a stop. I’m surprised by how loud I think it.

I DON’T SEE, hear, or smell Miss Hilly for two days.

hang up the phone like she just don’t know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.

When they get home, they yawning, crickets is cricking.

I hear a dog barking, not a house dog, but the kind that sound like he yelling at you.

At the next corner, he stop. “Colored people off, last stop for you,” he holler in the rearview. “White people lemme know where y’all need to get to. I’ll get you close as I can.”

Can see lights on inside the houses, heads bent down, lights that should be off this time a night. Whatever going on, everbody either talking about it or listening to it.

It always sound scarier when a hollerer talk soft.

I look at the open back door and get that watched feeling again, with a white man’s voice in the room.

Minny got the most lonesome look in her eyes. “I wish Leroy was home,” she whisper. I doubt if them words ever been said in this house before.

I read how even the President a the United States telling Mayor Thompson he need to do better. Put a committee together with blacks and whites and work things out down here. But Mayor Thompson, he say—to President Kennedy—“I am not going to appoint a bi-racial committee. Let’s not kid ourselves. I believe in the separation of the races, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“Jackson, Mississippi, is the closest place to heaven there is,” he say. “And it’s going to be like this for the rest of our lives.” For the second time in two months, Jackson, Mississippi’s in the Life magazine. This time, though, we make the cover.

She give me a lemony smile.

say. I don’t know how this woman can stand her own self.

But I know what she thinking. She thinking, Great. Just what I need today. Another lady in this house who don’t like me.

Ever afternoon, I tell her: You kind, you smart, you important. But she growing up and I know, soon, them few words ain’t gone be enough.

“Little colored girl say ‘I got a nose, you got a nose.’” I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.

They don’t let no nekkid babies swim at the country club.” Nor Negroes nor Jews. I used to work for the Goldmans. The Jackson Jews got to swim at the Colonial Country Club, the Negroes, in May’s Lake.

We pass the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, the Seale-Lily Ice Cream drive-thru. They got a sliding window on the back side so colored folk can get our ice cream too.

we trudge across the steaming black lot. Gridlines make it like we on a charcoal grill, roasting like corncobs.

lagging back on my hand looking stunned like she just got slapped.

The part in my hair get to burning, then itching, but I can’t scratch at it cause both hands is full then whoo! somebody blow out the flame. The lobby’s dark, cool, heaven. We blink awhile.

She frowning cause she feel out a place, but smiling cause she don’t want nobody to know it.

nodding her head like she a doll on a dashboard.

She blow a thicket a hair off her forehead, but it’s stuck. She don’t move out the sun, though.

I swallow hard. Miss Hilly trying to whisper but she really ain’t no good at it.

Everbody around us is sunning and laughing and squinting, not a soul guessing that the colored woman and the white woman with the tennis racquet is wondering the same thing: is we fools to feel some relief?

I feel like I’m selling something nobody want to buy. Something big and stinky, like Kiki Brown and her lemon smell-good polish. But what really makes me and Kiki the same is, I’m proud a what I’m selling.

I reckon peoples is starting to think old Aibileen’s basket ain’t got many pawpaws left in it.

and a quiet power fill up the room, like bees buzzing on a comb.

But Yule May, she probably the most educated maid we got in our parish. Seeing her makes me think again about the wrong I need to right.

“What I want to know is,” he say slow, angry, “what we plan to do about it.” Deacon got a stern look on his face like he done talked with Jessup before.

drinking coffee too hot for the weather.

Shoot. I’d fire my own self for what I did.

spells out her telephone number like a floor-mopping jingle, “Emerson two-sixty-six-oh-nine!”

she’s a good girl but I got pregnant with Leroy Junior when I wasn’t much older than her and a Buick had something to do with it.

a heat wave of a hundred degrees moves in and doesn’t budge. It’s like a hot water bottle plopped on top of the colored neighborhood, making it ten degrees worse than the rest of Jackson.

He’d rather get beat with a broom than go back out in that nonsense.

if God had intended for white people and colored people to be this close together for so much of the day, he would’ve made us color-blind.

She reminds me of a big, white, ugly schoolteacher. The kind that nobody ever wants to marry.

a car that’s plumb died of heat stroke in the road.

She’s holding down a laugh so hard she’s gone purple.

the concrete in my chest has loosened, melted down so I can breathe for a few days.

What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver.

She’s like a Philistine on a Sunday, the way she won’t take but so many steps a day. Except every day’s Sunday around here.

sweat half a gallon on the way. I mean, it’s only ninety-nine degrees outside.

picks a bottle up and looks at it like it’s Jesus in there and she can’t wait to get saved.

She’s dressed in a white sweater so tight it’d make a hooker look holy.

for the bobillionth time to wash her hands before she kills us both.