The Help (23 page)

We look at each other a second. “I’m tired of the rules,” I say.

Aibileen chuckles and looks out the window. I realize how thin this revelation must sound to her.

 

 

 

FOR FOUR DAYS STRAIGHT, I sit at my typewriter in my bedroom. Twenty of my typed pages, full of slashes and red-circled edits, become thirty-one on thick Strathmore white. I write a short biography of Sarah Ross, the name Aibileen chose, after her sixth-grade teacher who died years ago. I include her age, what her parents did for a living. I follow this with Aibileen’s own stories, just as she wrote them, simple, straightforward.

On day three, Mother calls up the stairs to ask what in the world I’m doing up there all day and I holler down,
Just typing up some notes from the Bible study. Just writing down all the things I love about Jesus.
I hear her tell Daddy, in the kitchen after supper, “She’s up to something.” I carry my little white baptism Bible around the house, to make it more believable.

I read and re-read and then take the pages to Aibileen in the evenings and she does the same. She smiles and nods over the nice parts where everyone gets along fine but on the bad parts she takes off her black reading glasses and says, “I know I wrote it, but you really want to put that in about the—”

And I say, “Yes, I do.” But I am surprised myself by what’s in these stories, of separate colored refrigerators at the governor’s mansion, of white women throwing two-year-old fits over wrinkled napkins, white babies calling Aibileen “Mama.”

At three a.m., with only two white correction marks on what is now twenty-seven pages, I slide the manuscript into a yellow envelope. Yesterday, I made a long-distance phone call to Missus Stein’s office. Her secretary, Ruth, said she was in a meeting. She took down my message, that the interview is on its way. There was no call back from Missus Stein today.

I hold the envelope to my heart and almost weep from exhaustion, doubt. I mail it at the Canton P. O. the next morning. I come home and lie down on my old iron bed, worrying over what will happen . . .
if she likes it.
What if Elizabeth or Hilly catches us at what we’re doing? What if Aibileen gets fired, sent to jail? I feel like I’m falling down a long spiral tunnel. God, would they beat her the way they beat the colored boy who used the white bathroom? What am I doing? Why am I putting her at such risk?

I go to sleep. I have nightmares for the next fifteen hours straight.

 

 

 

IT’s a QUARTER PAST ONE and Hilly and Elizabeth and I are sitting at Elizabeth’s dining room table waiting on Lou Anne to show up. I’ve had nothing to eat today except Mother’s sexual-correction tea and I feel nauseous, jumpy. My foot is wagging under the table. I’ve been like this for ten days, ever since I mailed Aibileen’s stories to Elaine Stein. I called once and Ruth said she passed it on to her four days ago, but still I’ve heard nothing.

“Is this not just the rudest thing you’ve ever heard of ?” Hilly looks at her watch and scowls. This is Lou Anne’s second time to be late. She won’t last long in our group with Hilly around.

Aibileen walks in the dining room and I do my best not to look at her for too long. I am afraid Hilly or Elizabeth will see something in my eyes.

“Stop jiggling your foot, Skeeter. You’re shaking the whole entire table,” Hilly says.

Aibileen moves around the room in her easy, white-uniformed stride, not showing even a hint of what we’ve done. I guess she’s grown deft at hiding her feelings.

Hilly shuffles and deals out a hand of gin rummy. I try to concentrate on the game, but little facts keep jumping in my head every time I look at Elizabeth. About Mae Mobley using the garage bathroom, how Aibileen can’t keep her lunch in the Leefolts’ refrigerator. Small details I’m privy to now.

Aibileen offers me a biscuit from a silver tray. She fills my iced tea like we are the strangers we were meant to be. I’ve been to her house twice since I mailed the package to New York, both times to trade out her library books. She still wears the green dress with black piping when I come over. Sometimes she’ll slip off her shoes under the table. Last time, she pulled out a pack of Montclairs and smoked right there with me in the room and that was kind of something, the casualness of it. I had one too. Now she is clearing away my crumbs with the sterling silver scraper I gave to Elizabeth and Raleigh for their wedding.

“Well, while we wait, I have some news,” Elizabeth says and I recognize the look on her face already, the secretive nod, one hand on her stomach.

“I’m pregnant.” She smiles, her mouth trembling a little.

“That’s great,” I say. I put down my cards and touch her arm. She truly looks like she might cry. “When are you due?”

“October.”

“Well, it’s about time,” Hilly says, giving her a hug. “Mae Mobley’s practically grown.”

Elizabeth lights a cigarette, sighs. She looks down at her cards. “We’re all real excited.”

While we play a few practice hands, Hilly and Elizabeth talk about baby names. I try to contribute to the conversation. “Definitely Raleigh, if it’s a boy,” I add. Hilly talks about William’s campaign. He’s running for state senate next year, even though he has no political experience. I’m grateful when Elizabeth tells Aibileen to go ahead and serve lunch.

When Aibileen comes back in with the gelatin salad, Hilly straightens in her chair. “Aibileen, I have an old coat for you and a sack of clothes from Missus Walters’ house.” She dabs her mouth with her napkin. “So you come on out to the car after lunch and pick it all up, alright?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Don’t forget now. I can’t worry with bringing them by again.”

“Oh now isn’t that nice of Miss Hilly, Aibileen?” Elizabeth nods. “You go on and get those clothes right after we’re done.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to colored people. Elizabeth smiles like she’s talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things.

By the time Lou Anne Templeton shows up, we’ve finished our shrimp and grits and are just starting on dessert. Hilly is amazingly forgiving. Lou Anne was late, after all, because of a League duty.

Afterward, I tell Elizabeth congratulations again, walk out to my car. Aibileen is outside collecting her gently used coat from 1942 and old clothes that, for some reason, Hilly won’t give to her own maid, Yule May. Hilly strides over to me, hands me an envelope.

“For the newsletter next week. You’ll be sure and get it in for me?”

I nod and Hilly walks back to her car. Just as Aibileen opens the front door to go back in the house, she glances back my way. I shake my head, mouth the word
Nothing.
She nods and goes on in the house.

That night, I work on the newsletter, wishing I was working on the stories instead. I go through the notes from the last League meeting, and come across Hilly’s envelope. I open it. It is one page, written in Hilly’s fat, curly pen:

 

 

 

THE PHONE rings in THE kitchen and I practically fall over myself racing to it. But Pascagoula has already answered it.

“Miss Charlotte residence.”

I stare her down, watch as tiny Pascagoula nods, says, “Yes ma’am, she here,” and hands me the phone.

“This is Eugenia,” I say quickly. Daddy’s in the fields and Mother’s at a doctor’s appointment in town, so I stretch the black, twisting phone cord to the kitchen table.

“Elaine Stein here.”

I breathe deep. “Yes ma’am. Did you receive my package?”

“I did,” she says and then breathes into the phone a few seconds.

“This Sarah Ross. I like her stories. She likes to kvetch without complaining too much.”

I nod. I don’t know what
kvetch
means, but I think it must be good.

“But I still stand by my opinion that a book of interviews . . . ordinarily wouldn’t work. It’s not fiction, but it’s not nonfiction either. Perhaps it’s anthropological but that’s a ghastly category to be in.”

“But you . . . liked it?”

“Eugenia,” she says, exhaling her cigarette smoke into the phone. “Have you seen the cover of
Life
magazine this week?”

I haven’t seen the cover of my
Life
magazine in a month, I’ve been so busy.

“Martin Luther King, dear. He just announced a march on D.C. and invited every Negro in America to join him. Every white person, for that matter. This many Negro and white people haven’t worked together since
Gone With the Wind.
”

“Yes, I did hear about the . . . marching . . . event,” I lie. I cover my eyes, wishing I’d read the paper this week. I sound like an idiot.

“My advice to you is, write it and write it fast. The march is in August. You should have it written by New Year’s.”

I gasp. She’s telling me to write it! She’s telling me . . . “Are you saying you’ll publish it? If I can write it by—”

“I said nothing of the sort,” she snaps. “I will read it. I look at a hundred manuscripts a month and reject nearly all of them.”

“Sorry, I just . . . I’ll write it,” I say. “I’ll have it finished in January.”

“And four or five interviews won’t be enough for a book. You’ll need a dozen, maybe more. You have more interviews set up, I assume?”

I press my lips together. “Some . . . more.”

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

THAT EVENING, I go to Aibileen’s. I hand her three more books from her list. My back hurts from leaning over the typewriter. This afternoon, I wrote down everyone I know who has a maid (which is everyone I know), and their maid’s name. But some of the names I can’t remember.

“Thank you, oh Law, look at this.” She smiles and flips to the first page of
Walden,
looks like she wants to start reading it right there.

“I spoke to Missus Stein this afternoon,” I say.

Aibileen’s hands freeze on the book. “I knew something was wrong. I seen it on your face.”

I take a deep breath. “She said she likes your stories very much. But . . . she won’t say if she’ll publish it until we’ve written the whole thing.” I try to look optimistic. “We have to be finished just after the new year.”

“But that’s good news, ain’t it?”

I nod, try to smile.

“
January,
” Aibileen whispers and she gets up and leaves the kitchen. She comes back with a Tom’s candy wall calendar. She sets it down on the table, flips through the months.

“Seem a long ways off now, but January ain’t but . . . two . . . four . . . six... ten pages away. Gone be here before we know it.” She grins.

“She said we have to interview at least twelve maids for her to consider it,” I say. The strain in my voice is starting to really come through.

“But . . . you ain’t got any other maids to talk to, Miss Skeeter.”

I clench my hands. I close my eyes. “I don’t have anyone I can ask, Aibileen,” I say, my voice rising. I’ve spent the last four hours poring over this very fact. “I mean, who is there? Pascagoula? If I talk to her, Mama will find out. I’m not the one who knows the other maids.”

Aibileen’s eyes drop from mine so fast I want to cry.
Damn it, Skeeter.
Any barrier that had eroded between us these past few months, I’ve just built back up in a matter of seconds. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry I raised my voice.”

“No, no, it’s alright. That was my job, to get the others.”

“What about . . . Lou Anne’s maid,” I say quietly, pulling out my list. “What’s her name . . . Louvenia? Do you know her?”

Aibileen nods. “I asked Louvenia.” Her eyes are still on her lap. “Her grandson the one got blinded. She say she real sorry, but she have to keep her mind on him.”

“And Hilly’s maid, Yule May? You’ve asked her?”

“She say she too busy trying to get her boys into college next year.”

“Any other maids that go to your church? Have you asked them?”

Aibileen nods. “They all got excuses. But really, they just too scared.”

“But how many? How many have you asked?”

Aibileen picks up her notebook, flips though a few pages. Her lips move, counting silently.

“Thirty-one,” Aibileen says.

I let out my breath. I didn’t know I’d been holding it.

“That’s . . . a lot,” I say.

Aibileen finally meets my look. “I didn’t want a tell you,” she says and her forehead wrinkles. “Until we heard from the lady . . .” She takes off her glasses. I see the deep worry in her face. She tries to hide it with a trembling smile.

“I’m on ask em again,” she says, leaning forward.

“Alright,” I sigh.

She swallows hard, nods rapidly to make me understand how much she means it. “Please, don’t give up on me. Let me stay on the project with you.”

I close my eyes. I need a break from seeing her worried face. How could I have raised my voice to her? “Aibileen, it’s alright. We’re . . . together on this.”

 

 

 

A FEW DAYS LATER, I sit in the hot kitchen, bored, smoking a cigarette, something I can’t seem to stop doing lately. I think I might be “addicted.” That’s a word Mister Golden likes to use.
The idjits are all addicts.
He calls me in his office every once in a while, scans the month’s articles with a red pencil, marking and slashing and grunting.