Chapter 12

Every other night for the next two weeks, I tell Mother I’m off to feed the hungry at the Canton Presbyterian Church, where we, fortunately, know not a soul. Of course she’d rather I go down to the First Presbyterian, but Mother’s not one to argue with Christian works and she nods approvingly, tells me on the side to make sure I wash my hands thoroughly with soap afterward.

Hour after hour, in Aibileen’s kitchen, she reads her writing and I type, the details thickening, the babies’ faces sliding into focus. At first, I’m disappointed that Aibileen is doing most of the writing, with me just editing. But if Missus Stein likes it, I’ll be writing the other maids’ stories and that will be more than enough work. If she likes it… I find myself saying this over and over in my head, hoping it might make it so.

Aibileen’s writing is clear, honest. I tell her so.

“Well, look who I been writing to.” She chuckles. “Can’t lie to God.”

Before I was born, she actually picked cotton for a week at Longleaf, my own family’s farm. Once she lapses into talking about Constantine without my even asking.

“Law, that Constantine could sing. Like a purebred angel standing in the front a the church. Give everbody chills, listening to that silky voice a hers and when she wouldn’t sing no more after she had to give her baby to —” She stops. Looks at me.

She says, “Anyway.”

I tell myself not to press her. I wish I could hear everything she knows about Constantine, but I’ll wait until we’ve finished her interviews. I don’t want to put anything between us now.

“Any word from Minny yet?” I ask. “If Missus Stein likes it,” I say, practically chanting the familiar words, “I just want to have the next interview set up and ready.”

Aibileen shakes her head. “I asked Minny three times and she still say she ain’t gone do it. I spec it’s time I believed her.”

I try not to show my worry. “Maybe you could ask some others? See if they’re interested?” I am positive that Aibileen would have better luck convincing someone than I would.

Aibileen nods. “I got some more I can ask. But how long you think it’s gone take for this lady to tell you if she like it?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. If we mail it next week, maybe we’ll hear from her by mid-February. But I can’t say for sure.”

Aibileen presses her lips together, looks down at her pages. I see something that I haven’t noticed before. Anticipation, a glint of excitement. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own self, it hasn’t occurred to me that Aibileen might be as thrilled as I am that an editor in New York is going to read her story. I smile and take a deep breath, my hope growing stronger.

On our fifth session, Aibileen reads to me about the day Treelore died. She reads about how his broken body was thrown on the back of a pickup by the white foreman. “And then they dropped him off at the colored hospital. That’s what the nurse told me, who was standing outside. They rolled him off the truck bed and the white men drove away.” Aibileen doesn’t cry, just lets a parcel of time pass while I stare at the typewriter, she at the worn black tiles.

On the sixth session, Aibileen says, “I went to work for Miss Leefolt in 1960. When Mae Mobley two weeks old,” and I feel I’ve passed through a leaden gate of confidence. She describes the building of the garage bathroom, admits she is glad it is there now. It’s easier than listening to Hilly complain about sharing a toilet with the maid. She tells me that I once commented that colored people attend too much church. That stuck with her. I cringe, wondering what else I’ve said, never suspecting the help was listening or cared.

One night she says, “I was thinking…” But then she stops.

I look up from the typewriter, wait. It took Aibileen vomiting on herself for me to learn to let her take her time.

“I’s thinking I ought to do some reading. Might help me with my own writing.”

“Go down to the State Street Library. They have a whole room full of Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty —”

Aibileen gives me a dry cough. “You know colored folks ain’t allowed in that library.”

I sit there a second, feeling stupid. “I can’t believe I forgot that.” The colored library must be pretty bad. There was a sit-in at the white library a few years ago and it made the papers. When the colored crowd showed up for the sit-in trial, the police department simply stepped back and turned the German shepherds loose. I look at Aibileen and am reminded, once again, the risk she’s taking talking to me. “I’ll be glad to pick the books up for you,” I say.

Aibileen hurries to the bedroom and comes back with a list. “I better mark the ones I want first. I been on the waiting list for To Kill a Mockingbird at the Carver Library near bout three months now. Less see…”

I watch as she puts checkmarks next to the books: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, poems by Emily Dickinson (any), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“I read some a that back in school, but I didn’t get to finish.” She keeps marking, stopping to think which one she wants next.

“You want a book by… Sigmund Freud?”

“Oh, people crazy.” She nods. “I love reading about how the head work. You ever dream you fall in a lake? He say you dreaming about your own self being born. Miss Frances, who I work for in 1957, she had all them books.”

On her twelfth title, I have to know. “Aibileen, how long have you been wanting to ask me this? If I’d check these books out for you?”

“A while.” She shrugs. “I guess I’s afraid to mention it.”

“Did you… think I’d say no?”

“These is white rules. I don’t know which ones you following and which ones you ain’t.”

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:

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.

“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.

“That’s fine,” he’ll say. “You fine?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Fine, then.” Before I leave, the fat receptionist hands me my ten-dollar check and that’s pretty much it for my Miss Myrna job.

The kitchen is hot, but I have to get out of my room, where all I do is worry because no other maids have agreed to work with us. Plus, I have to smoke in here because it’s about the only room in the house without a ceiling fan to blow ashes everywhere. When I was ten, Daddy tried to install one in the tin kitchen ceiling without asking Constantine. She’d pointed to it like he’d parked the Ford on the ceiling.

“It’s for you, Constantine, so you don’t get so hot being up in the kitchen all the time.”

“I ain’t working in no kitchen with no ceiling fan, Mister Carlton.”

“Sure you will. I’m just hooking up the current to it now.”

Daddy climbed down the ladder. Constantine filled a pot with water. “Go head,” she sighed. “Turn it on then.”

Daddy flipped the switch. In the seconds it took to really get going, cake flour blew up from the mixing bowl and swirled around the room, recipes flapped off the counter and caught fire on the stovetop. Constantine snatched the burning roll of parchment paper, quickly dipped it in the bucket of water. There’s still a hole where the ceiling fan hung for ten minutes.

In the newspaper, I see State Senator Whitworth pointing to an empty lot of land where they plan to build a new city coliseum. I turn the page. I hate being reminded of my date with Stuart Whitworth.

Pascagoula pads into the kitchen. I watch as she cuts out biscuits with a shot glass that’s never shot a thing but short dough. Behind me, the kitchen windows are propped open with Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogues. Pictures of two-dollar hand mixers and mail-order toys flutter in a breeze, swollen and puckered from a decade of rain.

Maybe I should just ask Pascagoula. Maybe Mother won’t find out. But who am I kidding? Mother watches her every move and Pascagoula seems afraid of me anyway, like I might tell on her if she does something wrong. It could take years to break through that fear. My best sense tells me, leave Pascagoula out of this.

The phone rings like a fire alarm. Pascagoula clangs her spoon on the bowl and I grab the receiver before she can.

“Minny gone help us,” Aibileen whispers.

I slip into the pantry and sit on my flour can. I can’t speak for about five seconds. “When? When can she start?”

“Next Thursday. But she got some… requirements.”

“What are they?”

Aibileen pauses a moment. “She say she don’t want your Cadillac anywhere this side a the Woodrow Wilson bridge.”

“Alright,” I say. “I guess I could… drive the truck in.”

“And she say… she say you can’t set on the same side a the room as her. She want a be able to see you square on at all times.”

“I’ll… sit wherever she wants me to.”

Aibileen’s voice softens. “She just don’t know you, is all. Plus she ain’t got a real good history with white ladies.”

“Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it.”

I walk out of the pantry beaming, hang the phone up on the wall. Pascagoula is watching me, the shot glass in one hand, a raw biscuit in the other. She looks down quickly and goes back to her work.

* * *

Two days later, I tell Mother I’m going to pick up a new copy of the King James Bible since I’ve worn mine so thin and all. I also tell her I feel guilty driving the Cadillac what with all those poor starving babies in Africa and I’ve decided to take the old truck today. She narrows her eyes at me from her porch rocker. “Where exactly do you plan on buying this new Bible?”

I blink. “The… they ordered it for me. At the Canton church.”

She nods, watches me the entire time it takes to start the old truck.

I drive to Farish Street with a lawn mower in the back and a rusted-out floorboard. Under my feet, I can see flashes of pavement whiz by. But at least I’m not pulling a tractor.

Aibileen opens the door and I come in. In the back corner of the living room, Minny stands with her arms crossed over her huge bosom. I’ve met her the few times Hilly allowed Missus Walters to host bridge club. Minny and Aibileen are both still in their white uniforms.

“Hello,” I say from my side of the room. “Good to see you again.”

“Miss Skeeter.” Minny nods. She settles in a wooden chair Aibileen has brought out from the kitchen, and the frame creaks. I sit on the far end of the sofa. Aibileen sits on the other end of the sofa, between us.

I clear my throat, produce a nervous smile. Minny doesn’t smile back. She is fat and short and strong. Her skin is blacker than Aibileen’s by ten shades, and shiny and taut, like a pair of new patent shoes.

“I already told Minny how we doing the stories,” Aibileen says to me. “You helping me write mine. And hers she gone tell you, while you write it down.”

“And Minny, everything you say here is in confidence,” I say. “You’ll get to read everything we —”

“What makes you think colored people need your help?” Minny stands up, chair scraping. “Why you even care about this? You white.”

I look at Aibileen. I’ve never had a colored person speak to me this way.

“We all working for the same thing here, Minny,” Aibileen says. “We just talking.”

“And what thing is that?” Minny says to me. “Maybe you just want me to tell you all this stuff so I get in trouble.” Minny points to the window. “Medgar Evers, the NAACP officer who live five minutes away, they blew up his carport last night. For talking.”

My face is burning red. I speak slowly. “We want to show your perspective… so people might understand what it’s like from your side. We – we hope it might change some things around here.”

“What you think you gone change with this? What law you want to reform so it say you got to be nice to your maid?”

“Now hold on,” I say, “I’m not trying to change any laws here. I’m just talking about attitudes and —”

“You know what’ll happen if people catch us? Forget the time I accidentally use the wrong changing room down at McRae’s women’s wear, I’d have guns pointing at my house.”

There’s a still, tight moment in the room with just the sound of the brown Timex clock ticking on the shelf.

“You don’t have to do this, Minny,” Aibileen says. “It’s alright if you want a change your mind.”

Slowly, warily, Minny settles again in her chair. “I do it. I just want a make sure she understand, this ain’t no game we playing here.”

I glance at Aibileen. She nods at me. I take a deep breath. My hands are shaking.

I start with the background questions and somehow we back our way into talking about Minny’s work. She looks at Aibileen as she talks, like she’s trying to forget I’m even in the room. I record everything she says, my pencil scratching as fast as I can move it. We thought it might be less formal than using the typewriter.

“Then they’s one job where I work late ever night. And you know what happened?”

“What’s… that?” I ask, even though she’s looking at Aibileen.

“Oh, Minny,” she cat-calls, “you the best help we ever had. Big Minny, we gone keep you on forever. Then one day she say she gone give me a week a paid vacation. I ain’t had no vacation, paid or unpaid, in my entire life. And when I pull up a week later to go back to work, they gone. Moved to Mobile. She tell somebody she scared I’d find new work before she move. Miss Lazy Fingers couldn’t go a day without having a maid waiting on her.”

She suddenly stands up, throws her bag on her arm. “I got to go. You giving me the heart palpitations talking bout this.” And out she goes, slamming the door behind her.

I look up, wipe the sweat off my temple.

“And that was a good mood,” Aibileen says.