The Help. Part 53

"I'm sorry, Aibileen. Hilly, if you want to . . . press charges, that's up to you."

Miss Hilly sniff at me and say, "It's not worth my time."

Miss Leefolt sigh like she relieved. For a second, our eyes meet and I can see that Miss Hilly was right. Miss Leefolt ain't got no idea Chapter Two is her. Even if she had a hint of it, she'd never admit to herself that was her.

I push back on Mae Mobley real gentle and she looks at me, then over at her mama through her sleepy, fever eyes. She look like she's dreading the next fifteen years a her life, but she sighs, like she is just too tired to think about it. I put her down on her feet, give her a kiss on the forehead, but then she reaches out to me again. I have to back away.

I go in the laundry room, get my coat and my pocketbook.

I walk out the back door, to the terrible sound a Mae Mobley crying again. I start down the driveway, crying too, knowing how much I'm on miss Mae Mobley, praying her mama can show her more love. But at the same time feeling, in a way, that I'm free, like Minny. Freer than Miss Leefolt, who so locked up in her own head she don't even recognize herself when she read it. And freer than Miss Hilly. That woman gone spend the rest a her life trying to convince people she didn't eat that pie. I think about Yule May setting in jail. Cause Miss Hilly, she in her own jail, but with a lifelong term.

I head down the hot sidewalk at eight thirty in the morning wondering what I'm on do with the rest a my day. The rest a my life. I am shaking and crying and a white lady walk by frowning at me. The paper gone pay me ten dollars a week, and there's the book money plus a little more coming. Still, it ain't enough for me to live the rest a my life on. I ain't gone be able to get no other job as a maid, not with Miss Leefolt and Miss Hilly calling me a thief. Mae Mobley was my last white baby. And here I just bought this new uniform.

The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open. I stand at the bus stop like I been doing for forty-odd years. In thirty minutes, my whole life's . . . done. Maybe I ought to keep writing, not just for the paper, but something else, about all the people I know and the things I seen and done. Maybe I ain't too old to start over, I think and I laugh and cry at the same time at this. Cause just last night I thought I was finished with everthing new.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Thank you to Amy Einhorn, my editor, without whom the sticky-note business would not be the success it is today. Amy, you are so wise. I am truly lucky to have worked with you.

Thank you to: my agent, Susan Ramer, for taking a chance and being so patient with me; Alexandra Sh.e.l.ley for her tenacious editing and diligent advice; The Jane Street Workshop for being such fine writers; Ruth Stockett, Tate Taylor, Brunson Green, Laura Foote, Octavia Spencer, Nicole Love, and Justine Story for reading and laughing, even at the parts that weren't that funny. Thank you to Grandaddy, Sam, Barbara, and Robert Stockett for helping me remember the old Jackson days. And my deepest thanks to Keith Rogers and my dear Lila, for everything everything.

Thank you to everyone at Putnam for their enthusiasm and hard work. I took liberties with time, using the song "The Times They Are A-Changin,' " even though it was not released until 1964, and Shake 'n Bake, which did not hit the shelves until 1965. The Jim Crow laws that appear in the book were abbreviated and taken from actual legislation that existed, at various times, across the South. Many thanks to Dorian Hastings and Elizabeth Wagner, the incredibly detailed copy editors, for pointing out these, my stubborn discrepancies, and helping me repair many others.

Thank you to Susan Tucker, author of the book Telling Memories Among Southern Women Telling Memories Among Southern Women, whose beautiful oral accounts of domestics and white employers took me back to a time and place that is long gone.

Finally, my belated thanks to Demetrie McLorn, who carried us all out of the hospital wrapped in our baby blankets and spent her life feeding us, picking up after us, loving us, and, thank G.o.d, forgiving us.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.

Kathryn Stockett, in her own words Our family maid, Demetrie, used to say picking cotton in Mississippi in the dead of summer is about the worst pastime there is, if you don't count picking okra, another p.r.i.c.kly, low-growing thing. Demetrie used to tell us all kinds of stories about picking cotton as a girl. She'd laugh and shake her finger at us, warning us against it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fall to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.

"For days I picked and picked. And then I looked down and my skin had bubbled up. I showed my mama. None a us ever seen sunburn on a black person before. That was for white people!"

I was too young to realize that what she was telling us wasn't very funny. Demetrie was born in Lampkin, Mississippi, in 1927. It was a horrifying year to be born, just before the Depression set in. Right on time for a child to appreciate, in fine detail, what it felt like to be poor, colored, and female on a sharecropping farm.

Demetrie came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty-eight. My father was fourteen, my uncle seven. Demetrie was stout and dark-skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Clyde. She wouldn't answer me when I asked questions about him. But besides the subject of Clyde, she'd talk to us all day.

And G.o.d, how I loved to talk to Demetrie. After school, I'd sit in my grandmother's kitchen with her, listening to her stories and watching her mix up cakes and fry chicken. Her cooking was outstanding. It was something people discussed at length after they ate at my grandmother's table. You felt loved loved when you tasted Demetrie's caramel cake. when you tasted Demetrie's caramel cake.

But my older brother and sister and I weren't allowed to bother Demetrie during her own lunch break. Grandmother would say, "Leave her alone now, let her eat, this is her time," and I would stand in the kitchen doorway, itching to get back with her. Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest so she could finish her work, not to mention, white people didn't sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarra.s.sed to admit that now.

I didn't pity Demetrie, though. There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house, cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own, and we felt like we were filling a void in her life. If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us: my sister, Susan, my brother, Rob, and me.

My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than the other kids were. n.o.body got cross with me if Demetrie was nearby. She would stand me in front of the mirror and say, "You are beautiful. You a beautiful girl," when clearly I was not. I wore gla.s.ses and had stringy brown hair. I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub. My mother was out of town a lot. Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around, and I felt left over. Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.

MY PARENTS DIVORCED when I was six. Demetrie became even more important to me then. When my mother went on one of her frequent trips, Daddy put us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us. I'd cry and cry on Demetrie's shoulder, missing my mother so bad I'd get a fever from it.

By then, my sister and brother had, in a way, outgrown Demetrie. They'd sit around the motel penthouse playing poker, using bar straws as money, with the front desk staff.

I remember watching them, jealous because they were older, and thinking one time, I am not a baby anymore. I don't have to take up with Demetrie while the others play poker. I am not a baby anymore. I don't have to take up with Demetrie while the others play poker.

So I got in the game and of course lost all my straws in about five minutes. And back I went onto Demetrie's lap, acting put out, watching the others play. Yet after only a minute, my forehead was against her soft neck and she was rocking me like we were two people in a boat.

"This where you belong. Here with me," she said, and patted my hot leg. Her hands were always cool. I watched the older kids play cards, not caring as much that Mother was away again. I was where I belonged.

THE RASH OF negative accounts about Mississippi, in the movies, in the papers, on television, have made us natives a wary, defensive bunch. We are full of pride and shame, but mostly pride.

Still, I got out of there. I moved to New York City when I was twenty-four. I learned that the first question anyone asked anybody, in a town so transient, was "Where are you from?" And I'd say, "Mississippi." And then I'd wait.

To people who smiled and said, "I've heard it's beautiful down there," I'd say, "My hometown is number three in the nation for gang-related murders." To people who said, "G.o.d, you must be glad to be out of that that place," I'd bristle and say, "What do you know? It's beautiful down there." place," I'd bristle and say, "What do you know? It's beautiful down there."

Once, at a roof party, a drunk man from a rich white Metro North- train type of town asked me where I was from and I told him Mississippi. He sneered and said, "I am so sorry."

I nailed down his foot with the stiletto portion of my shoe and spent the next ten minutes quietly educating him on the where-from-abouts of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Henson, Faith Hill, James Earl Jones, and Craig Claiborne, the food editor and critic for The New York Times The New York Times. I informed him that Mississippi hosted the first lung transplant and the first heart transplant and that the basis of the United States legal system was developed at the University of Mississippi.

I was homesick and I'd been waiting for somebody like him.

I wasn't very genteel or ladylike, and the poor guy squirmed away and looked nervous for the rest of the party. But I couldn't help it.

Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but G.o.d help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.

I WROTE THE HELP while living in New York, which I think was easier than writing it in Mississippi, staring in the face of it all. The distance added perspective. In the middle of a whirring, fast city, it was a relief to let my thoughts turn slow and remember for a while.

The Help is fiction, by and large. Still, as I wrote it, I wondered an awful lot what my family would think of it, and what Demetrie would have thought too, even though she was long dead. I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relations.h.i.+p that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature. is fiction, by and large. Still, as I wrote it, I wondered an awful lot what my family would think of it, and what Demetrie would have thought too, even though she was long dead. I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relations.h.i.+p that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.

I was truly grateful to read Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "Grady's Gift": There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.

I read that and I thought, How did he find a way to put it into such concise words? How did he find a way to put it into such concise words? Here was the same slippery issue I'd been struggling with and couldn't catch in my hands, like a wet fish. Mr. Raines managed to nail it down in a few sentences. I was glad to hear I was in the company of others in my struggle. Here was the same slippery issue I'd been struggling with and couldn't catch in my hands, like a wet fish. Mr. Raines managed to nail it down in a few sentences. I was glad to hear I was in the company of others in my struggle.

Like my feelings for Mississippi, my feelings for The Help The Help conflict greatly. Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us. conflict greatly. Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or the time to portray.

What I am am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital vital to our humanity. In to our humanity. In The Help The Help there is one line that I truly prize: there is one line that I truly prize: Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought. We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.

I'm pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn't something people felt compelled to examine.

I have wished, for many years, that I'd been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I've spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and creative writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publis.h.i.+ng and marketing for nine years. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and their daughter. This is her first novel.