The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

we can’t just sit here like a duck dinner,

truly, I’ve got no words to draw from. This is a brand-new invention we’ve come up with.

It seems like at some point you’d just run out of awful.

the shame of the eye is worse than the pain.

“She just don’t see em. The lines. Not between her and me, not between her and Hilly.”

“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.

“I don’t need no phone. You’ll hear him screaming for mercy all the way over here.”

we’re breathing the same air those Chicago people breathed two days ago. Wondering if, for no good reason I started thinking about Sears and Roebuck or Shake ’n Bake, would it be because some Illinoian had thought it two days ago.

“Why you don’t like you own natural color?” Not that I have any idea what that might be. But it’s sure not the brass-bell or the sickly white on those cards in her hand.

Whatever the white version of a juke joint hussy is, that’s what they’ll be calling her. She won’t even know what’s happening.

Sickedness, disgust, disbelief—it all wraps together in me like a ham roll.

She’s smiling like she just discovered the cure for polio,

enough costume jewelry for a whole family of hookers,

I might as well be Little Stevie Wonder I am so blinded by that dress.

She’s popping out like a corn cob in Crisco.

congressmen with us tonight, if you don’t straighten this thing out with the separate schools, don’t think I won’t come down there and do it myself.”

“Going from Hilly to Celia must’ve been quite the change, Johnny.” Johnny shakes his head. “Like living in Antarctica all my life and one day moving to Hawaii.”

get a guilt thick as Yazoo clay.

They’s something bout doing wrong to that woman that make it just seem right.”

Miss Hilly think everbody just as two-faced as she is.”

I set the platter of roast beef down on the kitchen table and watch, hoping this doesn’t turn into something.

the tree’s starting to sway a little, drunk as my daddy.

President Kennedy’s assassination, less than two weeks ago, has struck the world dumb. It’s like no one wants to be the first to break the silence. Nothing seems important enough.

that’s what you get when you put thirty-one toilets on the most popular girl’s front yard. People tend to treat you a little differently than before.

a door made of ice so thick it would take a hundred Mississippi summers to melt it.

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

“And you call yourself a Christian,” were Hilly’s final words to me and I thought, God. When did I ever do that?

The front window has a new smash in it the shape of a sunset.

??

It defeats the point of the book, to put in only part of the story. It wouldn’t be telling the truth.

“I can’t write it if I don’t know what happened, Aibileen. So if you can’t tell me…I was wondering if there’s someone else who will.” Aibileen shakes her head. “I reckon they is,” she says, “but I don’t want nobody else telling you that story.”

Mother is always cold and my parents’ house feels like I’m soaking in a vat of hot butter.

her cloud of hairspray. She must risk her life every time she lights a cigarette. I wonder, if I pushed the top of her head, would aerosol spray out of her mouth.

a red wool A-line dress with a cape coat over it, Sherlock Holmes–style,

It’s just too much with stamps going up to six cents and all.

staring at me with eyes so wide, I can see there isn’t anything back there where her brain should be.

Everyone’s asleep in this town in every way possible.

I’m starting to hate the whiny teenage songs about love and nothing. In a moment of aligned wavelengths, I pick up Memphis WKPO and out comes a man’s voice, drunk-sounding, singing fast and bluesy. At a dead end street, I ease into the Tote-Sum store parking lot and listen to the song. It is better than anything I’ve ever heard.

I feel a rush of inexplicable relief. I feel like I’ve just heard something from the future.

Had on this prairie-looking dress and a peace sign and her hair was long and she didn’t have any lipstick on.

“There’s no place left inside me for you.”

“Say what?” Minny says, looking at me for the first time. “That’s the best way to describe it, don’t you think?” I say. “If you got a corn cob up you butt.” “This isn’t fiction, Minny. It’s sociology. It has to sound exact.” “But that don’t mean it have to sound boring,”

Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.

words sit like a tiny, sweet candy on my tongue.

If I hadn’t had the mother I have, I might not have thought it.

she’s part of some under the ground group

“What happened?” I ask. “Is it really that terrible?”

then you in so much trouble”—Aibileen shudders—“there ain’t even a name for it.”

I’m shocked and yet, didn’t I know this?

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