Thursday, July 16, 2009

Amercian Racism


As a child in America’s Deep South in the 1970s, Kathryn Stockett was not really aware of the racial divides around her. Now she has written a novel about the community in 1960s Mississippi from the point of view of the black servants.
The British cover to Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help – about the experiences of black maids in Mississippi in the early 1960s – is a period photograph of a little white girl in a pushchair flanked by two black women in starched white uniforms – the 'help’ of the book’s title.
The photograph, which was found in the National Congress archives, was deemed too controversial to be used on the American cover. The spectre of racism in the South is still raw and political correctness works overtime.
When Stockett was first shown the photograph, which was inscribed Port Gibson, Mississippi, she sent it to a friend of hers, who, in turn, forwarded it to his mother. Back came the reply, 'Why, that’s just little Jane Crisler Wince on the corner of Church Street – she had two maids – her family owns the local paper…’ Stockett was thrilled with this information. 'That the whole South is just one small town, and we pass each other in the grocery store every day is a myth I love to perpetuate,’ she says.
The Help took five years to write, got at least 45 rejection letters from agents, and when finally published went straight into the American bestseller lists. It has sold a quarter of a million copies so far in the US, and is still selling briskly.
The book is set in Jackson, Mississippi, just before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. There are three narrators: the wise and serene Aibileen, who works for the Leefolt household, bringing up their little daughter Mae Mobley; Minny, Aibileen’s feisty friend, the best cook in town, who is prone to losing her job because of her big mouth; and tall, skinny Miss Skeeter, so called because of her resemblance to a mosquito when she was a baby, a white Southern belle with ambitions to be a writer.
Skeeter is disturbed when she hears her friends in the Junior League (a sort of American women’s institute that does charitable works) discussing their latest project, the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, which decrees that all domestic help should have separate lavatories outside the house, in order not to spread disease.
Skeeter decides to cross the divide and write a book, based on the experiences of the maids, an anonymous oral history, but most are too frightened to take part – this was a time when domestic help could be fired at the drop of a hat, when one word from a powerful white employer could put them in jail for 'stealing’, when a young gardener was beaten nearly to death for using the wrong lavatory at the golf club. The endemic racism that the book describes is so casual in its cruelty and indifference that it is profoundly shocking to realise that the time it describes was only 45 years ago.
It’s a risky thing to do – being white and well off – to write in a black voice, especially writing in the vernacular. The dialect Stockett employs is like another language; it is a clever act of ventriloquism, which draws you completely into a world of okra and fried chicken and peach cobbler, but a world with menacing undertones. It is history on the cusp of change, and Stockett has captured the unique complexities of the relationships between white women who will entrust the upbringing of their babies to someone with whom they will not share a bathroom. In the book Aibileen always leaves the families she works for as soon as the child she’s looking after starts to see her in a different light.
'I want to stop that moment from coming – and it come in ever white child’s life – when they start to think that coloured folks ain’t as good as whites.’
Kathryn Stockett is 40 years old, slight and graceful with blond hair and a wide-eyed, slightly startled expression. She lives in an elegantly decorated house in Atlanta, Georgia; when I arrive, her husband, Keith, who works in software technology, is out back marinating pork for the next day’s barbecue, and her six-year-old daughter, Lila, is at the swimming-pool with some neighbours. Stockett is completely charming. She talks like a Southern belle, though it’s probably the English concept of a Southern belle; 'Would y’all care for something to sip on?’ she asks. She serves tea and cake while telling me about when she attended 'culinary school’, caressing the words in her high sing-song voice.
We take our tea on to the doorstep in front of her large detached house in a neighbourhood that is actually very close to ugly downtown Atlanta, but is a world apart: a leafy park, ancient oak trees, beautiful houses, mostly built in the 1920s, with wide lawns front and back. It is like those idyllic streets where the teenagers in American horror films live.
Stockett is telling me about her grandparents, who played a big part in her life when she was a child. Her grandmother Caroline grew up in Shanghai in a family of missionaries ('Grandmother went over there with her family to save the souls of the heathens’), returning to Mississippi when war broke out. 'She came back to settle down and start a family with a very strict idea of how things should be between people of colour, coming from Shanghai, where there was no middle class. And of course that is exactly how Mississippi did things, so she fitted right in.’
She married Kathryn’s grandfather, Robert Stockett Sr, and employed a maid called Demetrie to bring up their two sons, one of whom was Kathryn’s father, Robert Jr. ('We call them maids,’ Kathryn says. 'I’m told that’s not PC now; we should call them housekeepers.’) Robert Stockett Sr was an equestrian and he ran a stable, with retired horses given to him by the Southern Cavalry. Everyone in Mississippi knew about Stockett’s Stables. 'It was a place where people gathered; a lot of older men came there to sit on the porch and talk; people would say that there were more laws made on the porch of Stockett Stables than in the state capital.’
Robert Snr, (to whom the book is dedicated), who died only recently, aged 98, was 6ft 4in and wore knee-length riding boots. 'He was good friends with [the writer] Eudora Welty; she had TB and at the time the only thing recommended for TB was fresh air and sunshine, so she’d go and hang out at the stables; but she’d get upset if those men said too many curse words.’
On the other side of town, Stockett grew up with her older brother and sister, Susan and Rob. Their parents divorced when she was six. 'After that, my mother would go out of town a lot – she was in her thirties, she was good-looking and she needed some space. Mother was wild. She wore high heels and low-cut sweaters and she dated a journalist who travelled all over the world. So she handed us over to Father and he would stick us in the motel.’
Her father owned Ramada Motels in Mississippi. Sometimes Demetrie would go and look after the children in the motel, more often Stockett would go to her grandparents’ house after school, where she would stay. 'It was just heaven for a kid: you had horses and there were people who’d catch them for you and saddle them up and you could just roam everywhere; there was tons of land to explore, and a haybarn and the sawdust barn – imagine a room of this size full of sawdust shavings? And there was a rope swing in there, and we could drive old trucks around…’
Mostly, she liked the fact that everything stayed the same at her grandparents; they ate lunch and supper there every day. 'There was always a big gathering for lunch. If you came to lunch once my grandparents would set a place for you for the rest of your life, and expect you to come.’
But she was a little bit displaced. 'I didn’t always know where my mother was, I didn’t know where my father was, but I always knew where Demetrie was. I would go to my grand-parents’ six days a week. Demetrie was always there.’
Stockett’s life growing up in Jackson in the late 1970s is not really comparable with the time her book is set in the early 1960s; but even now most of the well-off white families in Mississippi have maids, and most of them are black. 'The relationship between white families and the black help doesn’t exist any more the way it did; the intimacy is gone. It’s a good thing, because black people were hugely dependant on their employers – we were their source of income. Demetrie didn’t have a car; she didn’t have health insurance. If she needed the doctor we took her, and we paid. And that was the understanding: you come and work for our family, you look after us for the rest of our lives, and we’ll look after you for the rest of your life. Now the help is being paid better, they’re being treated on more equal terms, but we’ll never have that intimacy with them again. Blacks and whites are not close any more in Mississippi. But that had to happen. We had to separate and break off that dependancy so that down the road we can come together as equals.’
In her afterword to the book, Stockett quotes the writer and journalist Howell Raines: '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.’
Stockett says it took her 20 years to realise the irony of the situation with her beloved Demetrie. 'We would tell anybody, “Oh, she’s just like a part of our family,” and that we loved the domestics that worked for us so dearly – and yet they had to use a bathroom on the outside of the house.’
Did Demetrie have her own bathroom? Stockett looks steadily at me. 'Yes.’
And did you just accept that at the time? 'I never knew about it! I’m so naive and stupid that I never gave a thought to where she went to the bathroom until I was 20. I’m so embarrassed about this. It never occurred to me that she had a separate bathroom, but when I came home from college I found this door on the outside of my grandparents’ house.’
The Stockett family went to Demetrie’s funeral, it was the first time Stockett had been to a black church. 'I’d never had any interaction with black people except those who worked for our family. And I couldn’t believe how overt their emotions were. There were people speaking out during the sermon, joining in, agreeing with the eulogy, singing loud solos impromptu… but what really struck me as heartbreaking was how Demetrie’s husband was carrying on.’
Demetrie’s husband was called Plunk, and he was drunk and abusive, so much so that she slept with a pistol underneath her pillow. 'As I understand it he beat the crap out of her, but at the funeral this man was wandering the aisles, screaming, fainting from heartbreak that Demetrie was dead, calling out her name and throwing himself at the coffin – people were dragging him away, soothing him. It horrified our family. I was 16. I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut.’
Stockett would beg her grandparents to be allowed to go to Demetrie’s house but they always said no. Finally, just one time, they agreed. 'I was probably seven. I got to look around for five minutes. It was a strange feeling to realise that Demetrie had another life; it was my first awakening that she was a person with an identity outside the Stockett family.’
In the book the most brutal member of the Junior League is Miss Hilly Holbrook, who is outspoken and contemptuous of the maids, but in reality, Stockett says, there weren’t many people who spoke about race so openly, at least when she was growing up. 'It was whispered. It was much more nuanced in real life – at least from a white person’s perspective. It’s not something people discussed at the dinner table. Southern women were taught that it was not a ladylike subject to discuss. One of the criticisms I’ve gotten of the book is that it’s not nuanced enough, but if you look at it from the black point of view, there’s no nuance about having to use a separate plate because the white people don’t want you to use their crockery.’
Stockett believes that even now Jackson, Mississippi, is still one of the most segregated towns in the US. Her mother, Ruth Elliott Stockett, still lives in Jackson. 'She runs the election system for the state of Mississippi – and if you met her, you would laugh! She’s high-pitched, Southern, comes off as kind of absent-minded, but she’s very intelligent. My mother doesn’t have a maid – she’s a liberal. She cleans her own house. And she’s completely colour-blind, she has no sense of black and white. I remember when I was growing up I came home from school one day and my mother was sitting in the living-room with a black woman, talking and laughing and having a good time. After the woman left I came down and said, “Mum, who was that black lady in our house?” We’d never had a black guest before. And you know what my mother said? “She was black?” She wasn’t kidding. She didn’t even notice.’
In 2001 Stockett was in New York, working in magazine publishing, on the business side, and decided to take a month off to finish something she was writing. That was September 9. On September 11 she was working in her apartment when the planes hit the twin towers, and due to some sort of power surge, everything was wiped off her hard disc, and she had no landline and no mobile phone reception. For two days she and her husband were completely cut off. 'I felt so homesick, I’ve never been that homesick in my life, and on September 12 I started writing a story, in the voice of Demetrie, to comfort myself.’
That became The Help. She worked on it for the next five years and then started sending it out to agents. 'Every time I got another rejection letter, after I got over the part where I felt like shit, I’d go back to the manuscript and revisit it, and there were certain things that I realised didn’t work.’
She must have some confidence. 'Ask my husband, he’ll tell you: she’s so stubborn, she’s so pig-headed. If you tell me I can’t do something, chances are I’m just going to try harder to do it. Sometimes it can be very, very annoying…’ Finally she sent it to an agent called Susan Ramer who loved it, and found a publisher for her within a week: Amy Einhorn chose it to launch her own imprint at GP Putnam’s Sons. The book was published in America in February to very good reviews and immediately went to number 11 on the bestseller list. It spent 12 weeks there, the longest for any debut published in the States this year. Stockett was going to do readings in only two cities – Jackson and Memphis. Twenty-seven cities later, she is still travelling.
The film rights to The Help have been acquired by Stockett’s great friend Tate Taylor, whom she grew up with in Jackson. 'It’s scary putting a part of your financial and professional future in the hands of a good friend, even if you believe in them, because he’s still on the cusp – he hasn’t had huge success yet, but he’s talented and I know he will.’ Tate introduced her to the actress Octavia Spencer, who was the inspiration for Minny Jackson in the book. (Her heart sank when Stockett gave her the manuscript to read, worried that she might appear as a character like Mammy from Gone With the Wind. 'And then I read it and I couldn’t stop reading it. It was brilliant.’)
Spencer comes from Montgomery, Alabama, where her mother worked as a maid. She does the voice of Minny in the audio version of The Help, as well as for the forthcoming BBC radio dramatisation for Woman’s Hour. She completely endorses Stockett’s use of dialect, and the way she has captured the characters of the maids. Stockett is a steel magnolia, says Spencer. 'Very beautiful to look at but extremely strong. She’s a force to be reckoned with and I find that to be true about quite a few Southern women.’
It is hard to put your finger on why The Help is so outstanding: it is immensely funny, it is 450 pages in length but it skips briskly along and is very compelling. Stockett has a very evocative turn of phrase. She is brilliant on people, on food, on relationships, on the weather: 'At the end of June, a heatwave of a hundred degrees moves in and doesn’t budge. It’s like a hot water bottle plopped on top of the coloured neighbourhood, making it 10 degrees worse than the rest of Jackson. It’s so hot, Mister Dunn’s rooster walks in my door and squats his red self right in front of my kitchen fan. I come in to find him looking at me like, I ain’t moving nowhere, lady. He’d rather get beat with a broom than go back out in that nonsense.’
One of my favourite characters is Miss Celia. Celia Rae Foote grew up in Sugar Ditch, Mississippi, and she ain’t educated. Lower than white trash, sweet-natured with peroxide blond hair and very tight dresses, Miss Celia is despised by all the snobbish Junior Leaguers; she can’t play bridge and she can’t cook but wants to pretend to her new husband, Mister Johnny, that she can, so she secretly hires Minny.
'I had a lot of fun writing Miss Celia,’ Stockett says. 'I wanted to create a character who’s so poor that they’re beyond prejudice. But in terms of dialogue? Hers was the hardest to capture. When you really get down into deep, thick redneck accents, you kinda have to take out all your teeth before you can really pull it off. But I do love those accents,’ she sighs.
She feels she’s finally ready to let the book go now. 'I’m done with The Help now. I really am.’ Have you started to write something else? 'I have. And it has a little bit of nut and a little bit of spice in it. I’m writing a story about a nice Christian family in Mississippi who fall on hard times during the Depression and I’m trying to explore just how far they would go to save themselves. I already know how much trouble I am going to get into for this…’ She talks with a sense of inevitability, as if she has no control over the fate of her characters.
'I don’t! You don’t get a choice. The story just takes this turn and it keeps going in that direction no matter how hard you fight it. I really didn’t want to write The Help; I wanted to write something mysterious and elusive, and… nuanced.’
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AIBILEEN August 1962
Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised 17 kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.
But I ain’t never seen a baby yell like Mae Mobley Leefolt. First day I walk in the door, there she be, red-hot and hollering with the colic, fighting that bottle like it’s a rotten turnip. Miss Leefolt, she look terrified a her own child. 'What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I stop it?’
It? That was my first hint: something is wrong with this situation.
So I took that pink, screaming baby in my arms. Bounced her on my hip to get the gas moving and it didn’t take two minutes fore Baby Girl stopped her crying, got to smiling up at me like she do.
But Miss Leefolt, she don’t pick up her own baby for the rest a the day. I seen plenty a womens get the baby blues after they done birthing. I reckon I thought that’s what it was.
Here’s something about Miss Leefolt: she not just frowning all the time, she skinny. Her legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week. Twenty-three years old and she lanky as a 14-year-old boy. Even her hair is thin, brown, see-through.
Fact, her whole body be so full a sharp knobs and corners, it’s no wonder she can’t soothe that baby. Babies like fat. That I know.
By the time she a year old, Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go. Five o’clock would come round and she’d be hanging on my Dr Scholl shoe, dragging over the floor, crying like I weren’t never coming back. Miss Leefolt, she’d narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns.
I lost my own boy, Treelore, right before I started waiting on Miss Leefolt. He was twenty-four years old. The best part of a person’s life. It just wasn’t enough time living in this world.
He had him a little apartment over on Foley Street. Seeing a real nice girl name Frances and I spec they was gone get married, but he was slow bout things like that.
Not cause he looking for something better, just cause he the thinking kind. Wore big glasses and reading all the time. He even start writing his own book, bout being a colored man living and working in Mississippi. Law, that made me proud. But one night he working late at the Scanlon-Taylor mill, lugging two-by-fours to the truck, splinters slicing all the way through the glove. He too small for that kind a work, too skinny, but he needed the job. He was tired. It was raining.
He slip off the loading dock, fell down on the drive. Tractor trailer didn’t see him and crushed his lungs fore he could move. By the time I found out, he was dead.
That was the day my whole world went black. Air look black, sun look black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls a my house. Minny came ever day to make sure I was still breathing, feed me food to keep me living. Took three months fore I even look out the window, see if the world still there. I was surprise to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did.
Five months after the funeral, I lifted myself up out a bed. I put on my white uniform and put my little gold cross back around my neck and I went to wait on Miss Leefolt cause she just have her baby girl. But it weren’t too long before I seen something in me had changed.
A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore.
'Get the house straightened up and then go on and fix some of that chicken salad now,’ say Miss Leefolt.
It’s bridge club day. Every fourth Wednesday a the month. A course I already got everthing ready to go — made the chicken salad this morning, ironed the tablecloths yesterday. Miss Leefolt got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with 65 pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don’t hate much in life, but me and that dress is not on good terms.
I arrange the this and the that for her lady friends.
Set out the good crystal, put the silver service out. Miss Leefolt, she like it fancy when she do a luncheon. Maybe she trying to make up for her house being small. They ain’t rich folk, that I know. Rich folk don’t try so hard.
I’m used to working for young couples, but I spec this is the smallest house I ever worked in. It’s just the one storey. Her and Mister Leefolt’s room in the back be a fair size, but Baby Girl’s room be tiny. The dining-room and the regular living-room kind a join up. Only two bathrooms, which is a relief cause I worked in houses where they was five or six. Take a whole day just to clean toilets. Miss Leefolt don’t pay but 95 cents an hour, less than I been paid in years. But after Treelore died, I took what I could. Landlord wasn’t gone wait much longer. Even though it’s small, Miss Leefolt done the house up nice as she can. She pretty good with the sewing machine. Anything she can’t buy new of, she just get her some blue material and sew it a cover.
The doorbell ring and I open it up.
'Hey, Aibileen,’ Miss Skeeter say, cause she the kind that speak to the help. 'How you?’
'Hey, Miss Skeeter. I’m alright. Law, it’s hot out there.’
Miss Skeeter real tall and skinny. Her hair be yellow and cut short above her shoulders cause she get the frizz year round. She 23 or so, same as Miss Leefolt and the rest of em. She wearing a white lace blouse buttoned up like a nun, flat shoes so I reckon she don’t look any taller. Her blue skirt gaps open in the waist. Miss Skeeter always look like somebody else told her what to wear.
I hear Miss Hilly and her mama, Miss Walter, pull up the driveway and toot the horn. Miss Hilly don’t live but 10 feet away, but she always drive over. I let her in and she go right past me and I figure it’s a good time to get Mae Mobley up from her nap.
Soon as I walk in her nursery, Mae Mobley smile at me, reach out her fat little arms.
'You already up, Baby Girl? Why you didn’t holler for me?’
She laugh, dance a little happy jig waiting on me to get her out. I give her a good hug. I reckon she don’t get too many good hugs like this after I go home.
Ever so often, I come to work and find her bawling in her crib, Miss Leefolt busy on the sewing machine rolling her eyes like it’s a stray cat stuck in the screen door. See, Miss Leefolt, she dress up nice ever day. Always got her make-up on, got a carport, double-door Frigidaire with the built-in icebox. You see her in the Jitney 14 grocery, you never think she go and leave her baby crying in her crib like that. But the help always know.
Today is a good day though. Mae Mobley just grins.
I tote her into the kitchen and put her in her high chair, and take the tray a devil eggs out to the dining-room. Miss Leefolt setting at the head and to her left be Miss Hilly Holbrook and Miss Hilly’s mama, Miss Walter, who Miss Hilly don’t treat with no respect. And then on Miss Leefolt’s right be Miss Skeeter.
I make the egg rounds, starting with ole Miss Walter first cause she the elder. She scoop a egg up and near bout drop it cause she getting the palsy. Then I move over to Miss Hilly and she smile and take two. Miss Hilly got a round face and dark brown hair in the beehive. Her skin be olive colour, with freckles and moles. She wear a lot a red plaid. And she getting heavy in the bottom. Today, since it’s so hot, she wearing a red sleeveless dress with no waist to it. She one a those grown ladies that still dress like a little girl with big bows and matching hats and such. She ain’t my favourite.
I spoon out the congealed salad and the ham sandwiches, can’t help but listen to the chatter. Only three things them ladies talk about: they kids, they clothes, and they friends. I hear the word Kennedy,
I know they ain’t discussing no politic. They talking about what Miss Jackie done wore on the tee vee.
When I get around to Miss Walter, she don’t take but one little old half a sandwich for herself.
'Mama,’ Miss Hilly yell at Miss Walter, 'take another sandwich. You are skinny as a telephone pole.’
Miss Hilly look over at the rest a the table. 'I keep telling her, if that Minny can’t cook she needs to just go on and fire her.’
My ears perk up at this. They talking bout the help. I’m best friends with Minny.
'Minny cooks fine,’ say ole Miss Walter. 'I’m just not so hungry like I used to be.’
Minny near bout the best cook in Hinds County, maybe even all a Mississippi. She ought a be the most sought-after help in the state. Problem is, Minny got a mouth on her. She always talking back. One day it be the white manager a the Jitney Jungle grocery, next day it be her husband, and ever day it’s gone be the white lady she waiting on. The only reason she waiting on Miss Walter so long is Miss Walter be deaf as a doe-nob.
'I think you’re malnutritioned, Mama,’ holler Miss Hilly. 'That Minny isn’t feeding you so that she can steal every last heirloom I have left.’ Miss Hilly huff out a her chair. 'I’m going to the powder room. Y’all watch her in case she collapses dead of hunger.’
When Miss Hilly gone, Miss Walter say real low, 'I bet you’d love that.’ Everbody act like they didn’t hear.
In the kitchen, Baby Girl’s up in her high chair, got purple juice all over her face. Soon as I walk in, she smile. I pat her little soft head and go back out to pour the ice tea. Miss Hilly’s back in her chair looking all bowed up about something else now.
'Oh Hilly, I wish you’d use the guest bathroom,’ say Miss Leefolt, rearranging her cards. 'Aibileen doesn’t clean in the back until after lunch.’
Hilly raise her chin up. Then she give one a her 'ah-hems’. 'But the guest bathroom’s where the help goes,’ Miss Hilly say.
Nobody says anything for a second. Then Miss Walter nod, like she explaining it all. 'She’s upset cause the Nigra uses the inside bathroom and so do we.’
Law, not this mess again. They all look over at me straightening the silver drawer and I know it’s time for me to leave. Miss Leefolt give me the look, say, 'Go get some more tea, Aibileen.’
I go like she tell me to, even though they cups is full to the rim. I stand around the kitchen a minute but I ain’t got nothing left to do in there. I need to be in the dining-room so I can finish my silver straightening. I wait a few minutes, wipe a counter. Give Baby Girl more ham and she gobble it up. Finally, I slip out to the hall, pray nobody see me.
All four of em got a cigarette in one hand, they cards in the other. 'Elizabeth, if you had the choice,’ I hear Miss Hilly say, 'wouldn’t you rather them take their business outside?’
This talk ain’t news to me. Everwhere in town they got a colored bathroom, and most the houses do too. But I look over and Miss Skeeter’s watching me and I freeze, thinking I’m about to get in trouble.
'I bid one heart,’ Miss Walter say.
'I don’t know,’ Miss Leefolt say, frowning at her cards, 'with Raleigh starting his own business and tax season not for six months… things are real tight for us right now.’
Miss Hilly talk slow, like she spreading icing on a cake. 'You just tell Raleigh every penny he spends on that bathroom he’ll get back when y’all sell this house.’ She nod like she agreeing with herself. 'All these houses they’re building without maid’s quarters? It’s just plain dangerous. Everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do. I double.’
All a sudden I want a hear what Miss Leefolt gone say to this. She my boss.
I guess everbody wonder what they boss think a them. 'It would be nice,’ Miss Leefolt say, taking a little puff a her cigarette, 'not having her use the one in the house. I bid three spades.’
'That’s exactly why I’ve designed the Home Help Sanitation Initiative,’ Miss Hilly say. 'As a disease-preventative measure.’
I’m surprised by how tight my throat get. It’s a shame I learned to keep down a long time ago.
Miss Skeeter look real confused. 'The Home… the what?’
'A bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the coloured help. I’ve even notified the surgeon general of Mississippi to see if he’ll endorse the idea. I pass.’
Miss Skeeter, she frowning at Miss Hilly. She set her cards down and say real matter-a-fact, 'Maybe we ought to just build you a bathroom outside, Hilly.’
And Law, do that room get quiet.
Miss Hilly say, 'I don’t think you ought to be joking around about the coloured situation. Not if you want to stay on as editor of the League, Skeeter Phelan.’
Miss Skeeter kind a laugh, but I can tell she don’t think it’s funny. 'What, you’d… kick me out? For disagreeing with you?’
Miss Hilly raise a eyebrow. 'I will do whatever I have to do to protect our town. Your lead, Mama.’
I go in the kitchen and don’t come out again till I hear the door close after Miss Hilly’s behind.

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