“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
“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
I haven’t seen the cover of my
“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
“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
“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.
“
“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.
“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.
“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