Kathryn Stockett - The Help

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:

Hilly Holbrook introduces the Home Help Sanitation Initiative. A disease preventative measure. Low-cost bathroom installation in your garage or shed, for homes without such an important fixture.

Ladies, did you know that:

• 99% of all colored diseases are carried in the urine

• Whites can become permanently disabled by nearly all of these diseases because we lack immunities coloreds carry in their darker pigmentation

• Some germs carried by whites can also be harmful to coloreds too. Protect yourself. Protect your children. Protect your help.

From the Holbrooks, we say, You’re welcome!

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.