Kathryn Stockett - The Help

I’M DELIBERATELY FIVE MINUTES LATE for the Monday night League meeting, our first in a month. Hilly’s been down at the coast, wouldn’t dare allow a meeting without her. She’s tan and ready to lead. She holds her gavel like a weapon. All around me, women sit and smoke cigarettes, tip them into glass ashtrays on the floor. I chew my nails to keep from smoking one. I haven’t smoked in six days.

Besides the cigarette missing from my hand, I’m jittery from the faces around me. I easily spot seven women in the room who are related to someone in the book, if not in it themselves. I want to get out of here and get back to work, but two long, hot hours pass before Hilly finally bangs her gavel. By then, even she looks tired of hearing her own voice.

Girls stand and stretch. Some head out, eager to attend to their husbands. Others dawdle, the ones with a kitchen full of kids and help that has gone home. I gather my things quickly, hoping to avoid talking to anyone, especially Hilly.

But before I can escape, Elizabeth catches my eye, waves me over. I haven’t seen her for weeks and I can’t avoid speaking to her. I feel guilty that I haven’t been to see her. She grabs the back of her chair and raises herself up. She is six months pregnant, woozy from the pregnancy tranquilizers.

“How are you feeling?” I ask. Everything on her body is the same except her stomach is huge and swollen. “Is it any better this time?”

“God, no, it’s awful and I still have three months to go.”

We’re both quiet. Elizabeth burps faintly, looks at her watch. Finally, she picks up her bag, about to leave, but then she takes my hand. “I heard,” she whispers, “about you and Stuart. I’m so sorry.”

I look down. I’m not surprised she knows, only that it took this long for anyone to find out. I haven’t told anyone, but I guess Stuart has. Just this morning, I had to lie to Mother and tell her the Whitworths would be out of town on the twenty-fifth, Mother’s so-called date to have them over.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say. “I don’t like talking about it.”

“I understand. Oh shoot, I better go on, Raleigh’s probably having a fit by himself with her.” She gives a last look at Hilly. Hilly smiles and nods her excusal.

I gather my notes quickly, head for the door. Before I make it out, I hear her.

“Wait a sec, would you, Skeeter?”

I sigh, turn around and face Hilly. She’s wearing the navy blue sailor number, something you’d dress a five-year-old in. The pleats around her hips are stretched open like accordion bellows. The room is empty except for us now.

“Can we discuss this, please, ma’am?” She holds up the most recent newsletter and I know what’s coming.

“I can’t stay. Mother’s sick—”

“I told you five months ago to print my initiative and now another week has passed and you still haven’t followed my instructions.”

I stare at her and my anger is sudden, ferocious. Everything I’ve kept down for months rises and erupts in my throat.

“I will not print that initiative.”

She looks at me, holding very still. “I want that initiative in the newsletter before election time,” she says and points to the ceiling, “or I’m calling upstairs, missy.”

“If you try to throw me out of the League, I will dial up Genevieve von Hapsburg in New York City myself,” I hiss, because I happen to know Genevieve’s Hilly’s hero. She’s the youngest national League president in history, perhaps the only person in this world Hilly’s afraid of. But Hilly doesn’t even flinch.

“And tell her what, Skeeter? Tell her you’re not doing your job? Tell her you’re carrying around Negro activist materials?”

I’m too angry to let this unnerve me. “I want them back , Hilly. You took them and they don’t belong to you.”

“Of course I took them. You have no business carrying around something like that. What if somebody saw those things?”

“Who are you to say what I can and cannot carry ar—”

“It is my job, Skeeter! You know well as I do, people won’t buy so much as a slice of pound cake from an organization that harbors racial integrationists!”

“Hilly.” I just need to hear her say it. “Just who is all that pound cake money being raised for, anyway?”

She rolls her eyes. “The Poor Starving Children of Africa?”

I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she’ll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town. But I get a better idea. “I’m going to call up Genevieve right now. I’m going to tell her what a hypocrite you are.”

Hilly straightens. I think for a second I’ve tapped a crack in her shell with those words. But then she licks her lips, takes a deep, noisy sniff.

“You know, it’s no wonder Stuart Whitworth dropped you.”

I keep my jaw clenched so that she cannot see the effect these words have on me. But inside, I am a slow, sliding scale. I feel everything inside of me slipping down into the floor. “I want those laws back,” I say, my voice shaking.

“Then print the initiative.”

I turn and walk out the door. I heave my satchel into the Cadillac and light a cigarette.

MOTHER’S LIGHT IS OFF when I get home and I’m grateful. I tiptoe down the hall, onto the back porch, easing the squeaky screen door closed. I sit down at my typewriter.

But I cannot type. I stare at the tiny gray squares of the back porch screen. I stare so hard, I slip through them. I feel something inside me crack open then. I am vaporous. I am crazy. I am deaf to that stupid, silent phone. Deaf to Mother’s retching in the house. Her voice through the window, “I’m fine, Carlton, it’s passed.” I hear it all and yet, I hear nothing. Just a high buzzing in my ears.

I reach in my satchel and pull out the page of Hilly’s bathroom initiative. The paper is limp, already damp with humidity. A moth lands in the corner then flutters away, leaving a brown smudge of wing chalk.

With slow, deliberate strokes, I start typing the newsletter: Sarah Shelby to marry Robert Pryor; please attend a baby-clothes showing by Mary Katherine Simpson; a tea in honor of our loyal sustainers. Then I type Hilly’s initiative. I place it on the second page, opposite the photo ops. This is where everyone will be sure to see it, after they look at themselves at the Summer Fun Jamboree. All I can think while I’m typing is, What would Constantine think of me?

“HOW OLD A YOU TODAY, big girl?”

Mae Mobley still in bed. She hold out two sleepy fingers and say, “Mae Mo Two.”

“Nuh-uh, we three today!” I move up one a her fingers, chant what my daddy used to say to me on my birthdays, “Three little soldiers, come out the doe, two say stop, one say go.”

She in a big-girl bed now since the nursery getting fixed up for the new baby. “Next year, we do four little soldiers, they looking for something to eat.”

Her nose wrinkle up cause now she got to remember to say she Mae Mobley Three, when her whole life she can remember, she been telling people she Mae Mobley Two. When you little, you only get asked two questions, what’s your name and how old you is, so you better get em right.

“I am Mae Mobley Three,” she say. She scramble out a bed, her hair in a rat’s nest. That bald spot she had as a baby, it’s coming back. Usually I can brush over it and hide it for a few minutes, but not for long. It’s thin and she’s losing them curls. It gets real stringy by the end a the day. It don’t trouble me that she ain’t cute, but I try to fix her up nice as I can for her mama.

“Come on to the kitchen,” I say. “We gone make you a birthday breakfast.”