The Help

“It’s not that I’d be fibbing to him. I just need a maid—”

“A course you need a maid. Last one done got shot in the head.”

“He never comes home during the day. Just do the heavy cleaning and teach me how to fix supper and it’ll only take a few months—”

My nose prickles from something burning. I see a waft of smoke coming from the oven. “And then what, you gone fire me after them few months?”

“Then I’ll . . . tell him,” she say but she’s frowning at the thought. “Please, I want him to think I can do it on my own. I want him to think I’m . . . worth the trouble.”

“Miss Celia . . .” I shake my head, not believing I’m already arguing with this lady and I haven’t worked here two minutes. “I think you done burned up your cake.”

She grabs a rag and rushes to the oven and jerks the cake out. “Oww! Dawgon it!”

I set my pocketbook down, sidle her out of the way. “You can’t use no wet towel on a hot pan.”

I grab a dry rag and take that black cake out the door, set it down on the concrete step.

Miss Celia stares down at her burned hand. “Missus Walters said you were a real good cook.”

“That old woman eat two butterbeans and say she full. I couldn’t get her to eat nothing.”

“How much was she paying you?”

“Dollar an hour,” I say, feeling kind of ashamed. Five years and not even minimum wage.

“Then I’ll pay you two.”

And I feel all the breath slip out of me.

“When Mister Johnny get out the house in the morning?” I ask, cleaning up the butterstick melting right on the counter, not even a plate under it.

“Six. He can’t stand to do-dad around here very long. Then he heads back from his real estate office about five.”

I do some figuring and even with the fewer hours it’d be more pay. But I can’t get paid if I get shot dead. “I’ll leave at three then. Give myself two hours coming and going so I can stay out a his way.”

“Good.” She nods. “It’s best to be safe.”

On the back step, Miss Celia dumps the cake in a paper sack. “I’ll have to bury this in the waste bin so he won’t know I’ve burned up another one.”

I take the bag out of her hands. “Mister Johnny ain’t seeing nothing. I’ll throw it out at my house.”

“Oh, thank you.” Miss Celia shakes her head like that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for her. She holds her hands in tight little fists under her chin. I walk out to my car.

I sit in the sagging seat of the Ford Leroy’s still paying his boss twelve dollars every week for. Relief hits me. I have finally gotten myself a job. I don’t have to move to the North Pole. Won’t Santy Claus be disappointed.

“SIT DOWN ON YOUR BEHIND, Minny, because I’m about to tell you the rules for working in a White Lady’s house.”

I was fourteen years old to the day. I sat at the little wooden table in my mama’s kitchen eyeing that caramel cake on the cooling rack, waiting to be iced. Birthdays were the only day of the year I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted.

I was about to quit school and start my first real job. Mama wanted me to stay on and go to ninth grade— she’d always wanted to be a schoolteacher instead of working in Miss Woodra’s house. But with my sister’s heart problem and my no-good drunk daddy, it was up to me and Mama. I already knew about housework. After school, I did most of the cooking and the cleaning. But if I was going off to work in somebody else’s house, who’d be looking after ours?

Mama turned me by the shoulders so I’d look at her instead of the cake. Mama was a crack-whip. She was proper. She took nothing from nobody. She shook her finger so close to my face, it made me cross-eyed.

“Rule Number One for working for a white lady, Minny: it is nobody’s business. You keep your nose out of your White Lady’s problems, you don’t go crying to her with yours—you can’t pay the light bill? Your feet are too sore? Remember one thing: white people are not your friends. They don’t want to hear about it. And when Miss White Lady catches her man with the lady next door, you keep out of it, you hear me?

“Rule Number Two: don’t you ever let that White Lady find you sitting on her toilet. I don’t care if you’ve got to go so bad it’s coming out of your hairbraids. If there’s not one out back for the help, you find yourself a time when she’s not there in a bathroom she doesn’t use.

“Rule Number Three—” Mama jerked my chin back around to face her because that cake had lured me in again. “Rule Number Three: when you’re cooking white people’s food, you taste it with a different spoon. You put that spoon to your mouth, think nobody’s looking, put it back in the pot, might as well throw it out.

“Rule Number Four: You use the same cup, same fork, same plate every day. Keep it in a separate cupboard and tell that white woman that’s the one you’ll use from here on out.

“Rule Number Five: you eat in the kitchen.

“Rule Number Six: you don’t hit on her children. White people like to do their own spanking.”

“Rule Number Seven: this is the last one, Minny. Are you listening to me? No sass-mouthing.”

“Mama, I know how—”

“Oh, I hear you when you think I can’t, muttering about having to clean the stovepipe, about the last little piece of chicken left for poor Minny. You sass a white woman in the morning, you’ll be sassing out on the street in the afternoon.”

I saw the way my mama acted when Miss Woodra brought her home, all Yes Ma’aming, No Ma’aming, I sure do thank you Ma’aming. Why I got to be like that? I know how to stand up to people.

“Now come here and give your mama a hug on your birthday—Lord, you are heavy as a house, Minny.”

“I ain’t eaten all day, when can I have my cake?”

“Don’t say ain’t, you speak properly now. I didn’t raise you to talk like a mule.”

First day at my White Lady’s house, I ate my ham sandwich in the kitchen, put my plate up in my spot in the cupboard. When that little brat stole my pocketbook and hid it in the oven, I didn’t whoop her on the behind.

But when the White Lady said: “Now I want you to be sure and handwash all the clothes first, then put them in the electric machine to finish up.”

I said: “Why I got to handwash when the power washer gone do the job? That’s the biggest waste a time I ever heard of.”

That White Lady smiled at me, and five minutes later, I was out on the street.

WORKING FOR MISS CELIA, I’ll get to see my kids off to Spann Elementary in the morning and still get home in the evening with time to myself. I haven’t had a nap since Kindra was born in 1957, but with these hours—eight to three—I could have one every day if that was my idea of a fine time. Since no bus goes all the way out to Miss Celia’s, I have to take Leroy’s car.

“You ain’t taking my car every day, woman, what if I get the day shift and need to—”

“She paying me seventy dollars cash every Friday, Leroy.”

“Maybe I take Sugar’s bike.”

On Tuesday, the day after the interview, I park the car down the street from Miss Celia’s house, around a curve so you can’t see it. I walk fast on the empty road and up the drive. No other cars come by.

“I’m here, Miss Celia.” I stick my head in her bedroom that first morning and there she is, propped up on the covers with her makeup perfect and her tight Friday-night clothes on even though it’s Tuesday, reading the trash in the Hollywood Digest like it’s the Holy B.

“Good morning, Minny! It’s real good to see you,” she says, and I bristle, hearing a white lady being so friendly.

I look around the bedroom, sizing up the job. It’s big, with cream-colored carpet, a yellow king canopy bed, two fat yellow chairs. And it’s neat, with no clothes on the floor. The spread’s made up underneath her. The blanket on the chair’s folded nice. But I watch, I look. I can feel it. Something’s wrong.

“When can we get to our first cooking lesson?” she asks. “Can we start today?”

“I reckon in a few days, after you go to the store and pick up what we need.”

She thinks about this a second, says, “Maybe you ought to go, Minny, since you know what to buy and