The Help

stash I’d brought to the table. I was fourteen but, feeling very grown up, I lit it. As I did, the overhead light dimmed to a dull, dirty brown, buzzing softly.

“Oh, my daddy looooved me. Always said I was his favorite.” She leaned back in her chair. “He used to come over to the house ever Saturday afternoon, and one time, he give me a set a ten hair ribbons, ten different colors. Brought em over from Paris, made out a Japanese silk. I sat in his lap from the minute he got there until he had to leave and Mama’d play Bessie Smith on the Victrola he brung her and he and me’d sing:

It’s mighty strange, without a doubt
Nobody knows you when you’re down and out

I listened wide-eyed, stupid. Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would’ve been Constantine’s voice singing. If singing was a color, it would’ve been the color of that chocolate.

“One time I was boo-hooing over hard feelings, I reckon I had a list a things to be upset about, being poor, cold baths, rotten tooth, I don’t know. But he held me by the head, hugged me to him for the longest time. When I looked up, he was crying too and he . . . did that thing I do to you so you know I mean it. Press his thumb up in my hand and he say . . . he sorry.”

We sat there, staring at the puzzle pieces. Mother wouldn’t want me to know this, that Constantine’s father was white, that he’d apologized to her for the way things were. It was something I wasn’t supposed to know. I felt like Constantine had given me a gift.

I finished my cigarette, stubbed it out in the silver guest ashtray. The light brightened again. Constantine smiled at me and I smiled back.

“How come you never told me this before?” I said, looking into her light brown eyes.

“I can’t tell you ever single thing, Skeeter.”

“But why?” She knew everything about me, everything about my family. Why would I ever keep secrets from her?

She stared at me and I saw a deep, bleak sadness there, inside of her. After a while, she said, “Some things I just got to keep for myself.”

WHEN IT WAS MY TURN to go off to college, Mother cried her eyes out when Daddy and I pulled away in the truck. But I felt free. I was off the farm, out from under the criticism. I wanted to ask Mother, Aren’t you glad? Aren’t you relieved that you don’t have to worry-wart over me every day anymore? But Mother looked miserable.

I was the happiest person in my freshman dorm. I wrote Constantine a letter once a week, telling her about my room, the classes, the sorority. I had to mail her letters to the farm since the post didn’t deliver to Hotstack and I had to trust that Mother wouldn’t open them. Twice a month, Constantine wrote me back on parchment paper that folded into an envelope. Her handwriting was large and lovely, although it ran at a crooked angle down the page. She wrote me every mundane detail of Longleaf: My back pains are bad but it’s my feet that are worse, or The mixer broke off from the bowl and flew wild around the kitchen and the cat hollered and ran off. I haven’t seen her since. She’d tell me that Daddy had a chest cold or that Rosa Parks was coming to her church to speak. Often she demanded to know if I was happy and the details of this. Our letters were like a yearlong conversation, answering questions back and forth, continuing face-to-face at Christmas or between summer school sessions.

Mother’s letters said, Say your prayers and Don’t wear heels because they make you too tall clipped to a check for thirty-five dollars.

In April of my senior year, a letter came from Constantine that said, I have a surprise for you, Skeeter. I am so excited I almost can’t stand myself. And don’t you go asking me about it neither. You will see for yourself when you come home.

That was close to final exams, with graduation only a month away. And that was the last letter I ever got from Constantine.

I SKIPPED MY GRADUATION CEREMONY at Ole Miss. All my close friends had dropped out to get married and I didn’t see the point in making Mama and Daddy drive three hours just to watch me walk across a stage, when what Mother really wanted was to watch me walk down the aisle. I still hadn’t heard from Harper & Row, so instead of buying a plane ticket to New York, I rode home to Jackson in sophomore Kay Turner’s Buick, squeezed in the front with my typewriter at my feet and her wedding dress between us. Kay Turner was marrying Percy Stanhope next month. For three hours I listened to her worry about cake flavors.

When I got home, Mother stepped back to get a better look at me. “Well, your skin looks beautiful,” she said, “but your hair . . .” She sighed, shook her head.

“Where’s Constantine?” I asked. “In the kitchen?”

And like she was delivering the weather, Mother said, “Constantine is no longer employed here. Now let’s get all these trunks unpacked before you ruin your clothes.”

I turned and blinked at her. I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. “What did you say?”

Mother stood straighter, smoothing down her dress. “Constantine’s gone, Skeeter. She went to live with her people up in Chicago.”

“But . . . what? She didn’t say anything in her letters about Chicago.” I knew that wasn’t her surprise. She would’ve told me such terrible news immediately.

Mother took a deep breath, straightened her back. “I told Constantine she wasn’t to write to you about leaving. Not in the middle of your final exams. What if you’d flunked and had to stay on another year? God knows, four years of college is more than enough.”

“And she . . . agreed to that? Not to write me and tell me she was leaving?”

Mother looked off, sighed. “We’ll discuss it later, Eugenia. Come on to the kitchen, let me introduce you to the new maid, Pascagoula.”

But I didn’t follow Mother to the kitchen. I stared down at my college trunks, terrified by the thought of unpacking here. The house felt vast, empty. Outside, a combine whirred in a cotton field.

By September, not only had I given up hope of ever hearing back from Harper & Row, I gave up on ever finding Constantine. No one seemed to know a thing or how I could reach her. I finally stopped asking people why Constantine had left. It was like she’d simply disappeared. I had to accept that Constantine, my one true ally, had left me to fend for myself with these people.

Chapter 6

ON A HOT SEPTEMBER MORNING, I wake up in my childhood bed, slip on the huarache shoes my brother, Carlton, brought me back from Mexico. A man’s pair since, evidently, Mexican girls’ feet don’t grow to size nine- and-a-half. Mother hates them and says they’re trashy-looking.

Over my nightgown, I put on one of Daddy’s old button-down shirts and slip out the front door. Mother is on the back porch with Pascagoula and Jameso while they shuck oysters.

“You cannot leave a Negro and a Nigra together unchaperoned,” Mother’d whispered to me, a long time ago. “It’s not their fault, they just can’t help it.”

I head down the steps to see if my mail-order copy of Catcher in the Rye is in the box. I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good. By the time I reach the end of the drive, my huaraches and ankles are covered with fine yellow dust.

On either side of me, the cotton fields are a glaring green, fat with bolls. Daddy lost the back fields to the rain last month, but the majority bloomed unharmed. The leaves are just starting to spot brown with defoliant and I can still smell the sour chemical in the air. There are no cars on the County Road. I open the mailbox.