The Help

“Yessir, she doing alright,” I say and narrow my eyes at her.

I hang up the phone and glare down at Miss Celia.

“He want to know how you doing.”

“I heard.”

“I lied for you, you know.”

She puts the pillow back over her head.

By the next afternoon, I can’t stand it another minute. Miss Celia’s still in the same spot she’s been all week. Her face is thin and that Butterbatch is greasy-looking. The room is starting to smell too, like dirty people. I bet she hasn’t bathed since Friday.

“Miss Celia,” I say.

Miss Celia looks at me, but doesn’t smile, doesn’t speak.

“Mister Johnny gone be home tonight and I told him I’d look after you. What’s he gone think if he find you laid up in that old nasty nightthing you got on?”

I hear Miss Celia sniffle, then hiccup, then start to cry full-on. “None of this would’ve happened if I’d just stayed where I belonged. He should’ve married proper. He should’ve married . . . Hilly.”

“Come on, Miss Celia. It ain’t—”

“The way Hilly looked at me . . . like I was nothing. Like I was trash on the side of the road.”

“But Miss Hilly don’t count. You can’t judge yourself by the way that woman see you.”

“I’m not right for this kind of life. I don’t need a dinner table for twelve people to sit at. I couldn’t get twelve people to come over if I begged.”

I shake my head at her. Complaining again cause she has too much.

“Why does she hate me so much? She doesn’t even know me,” Miss Celia cries. “And it’s not just Johnny, she called me a liar, accused me of getting her that . . . pie.” She bangs her fists against her knees. “I never would a thrown up if it wasn’t for that.”

“What pie?”

“H-H-Hilly won your pie. And she accused me of signing her up for it. Playing some . . . trick on her.” She wails and sobs. “Why would I do that? Write her name down on a list?”

It comes to me real slow what’s going on here. I don’t know who signed up Hilly for that pie, but I sure know why she’d eat alive anybody she thought did it.

I glance over at the door. That voice in my head says, Walk away, Minny. Just ease on out a here. But I look at Miss Celia bawling into her old nightgown, and I get a guilt thick as Yazoo clay.

“I can’t do this to Johnny anymore. I’ve already decided, Minny. I’m going back,” she sobs. “Back to Sugar Ditch.”

“You gone leave your husband just cause you throwed up at some party?” Hang on, I think, my eyes opening wide. Miss Celia can’t leave Mister Johnny—where in the heck would that leave me?

Miss Celia cries down harder at the reminder. I sigh and watch her, wondering what to do.

Lord, I reckon it’s time. Time I told her the one thing in the world I never want to tell anybody. I’m going to lose my job either way, so I might as well take the chance.

“Miss Celia . . .” I say and I sit down in the yellow armchair in the corner. I’ve never sat anywhere in this house but in the kitchen and her bathroom floor, but today calls for extreme measures.

“I know why Miss Hilly got so mad,” I say. “About the pie, I mean.”

Miss Celia blows a hard, loud honk into a tissue. She looks at me.

“I did something to her. It was Terrible. Awful.” My heart starts thumping just thinking about it. I realize I can’t sit in this chair and tell her this story at the same time. I get up and walk to the end of the bed.

“What?” she sniffs. “What happened, Minny?”

“Miss Hilly, she call me up at home last year, when I’s still working for Miss Walters. To tell me she sending Miss Walters to the old lady home. I got scared, I got five kids to feed. Leroy was already working two shifts.”

I feel a burn rise up in my chest. “Now I know what I did wasn’t Christian. But what kind a person send her own mama to the home to take up with strangers? They’s something bout doing wrong to that woman that make it just seem right.”

Miss Celia sits up in bed, wipes her nose. She looks like she’s paying attention now.

“For three weeks, I be looking for work. Ever day after I get off from Miss Walters’, I went looking. I go over to Miss Child’s house. She pass me up. I go on to the Rawleys’ place, they don’t want me neither. The Riches, the Patrick Smiths, the Walkers, not even those Catholic Thibodeaux with them seven kids. Nobody do.”

“Oh Minny . . .” says Miss Celia. “That’s awful.”

I clench my jaw. “Ever since I was a li’l girl, my mama tell me not to go sass-mouthing. But I didn’t listen and I got knowed for my mouth round town. And I figure that’s what it be, why nobody want to hire me.

“When they was two days left at Miss Walters’s and I still didn’t have no new job, I start getting real scared. With Benny’s asthma and Sugar still in school and Kindra and . . . we was tight on money already. And that’s when Miss Hilly, she come over to Miss Walters’s to talk to me.

“She say, ‘Come work for me, Minny. I pay you twenty-five more cent a day than Mama did.’ A ‘dangling carrot’ she call it, like I was some kind a plow mule.” I feel my fists forming. “Like I’d even consider beating my friend Yule May Crookle out a her job. Miss Hilly think everbody just as two-faced as she is.”

I wipe my hand across my face. I’m sweating. Miss Celia’s listening with her mouth open, looking dazed.

“I tell her ‘No thank you, Miss Hilly.’ And so she say she pay me fifty cent more and I say, ‘No ma’am. No thank you.’ Then she break my back, Miss Celia. She tell me she know bout the Childs and the Rawleys and all them others that turn me down. Said it was cause she’d made sure everbody knew I was a thief. I’ve never stole a thing in my life but she told everbody I did and wasn’t nobody in town gone hire a sass-mouthing thieving Nigra for a maid and I might as well go head and work for her for free.

“And that’s how come I did it.”

Miss Celia blinks at me. “What, Minny?”

“I tell her to eat my shit.”

Miss Celia sits there, still looking dazed.

“Then I go home. I mix up that chocolate custard pie. I puts sugar in it and Baker’s chocolate and the real vanilla my cousin bring me from Mexico.

“I tote it over to Miss Walters’s house, where I know Miss Hilly be setting round, waiting for the home to come and get her mama, so she can sell that house. Go through her silver. Collect her due.

“Soon as I put that pie down on the countertop, Miss Hilly smiles, thinking it’s a peace offering, like that’s my way a showing her I’m real sorry bout what I said. And then I watch her. I watch her eat it myself. Two big pieces. She stuff it in her mouth like she ain’t ever eaten nothing so good. Then she say, ‘I knew you’d change your mind, Minny. I knew I’d get my way in the end.’ And she laugh, kind a prissy, like it was all real funny to her.

“That’s when Miss Walters, she say she getting a mite hungry too and ask for a piece a that pie. I tell her, ‘No ma’am. That one’s special for Miss Hilly.’

“Miss Hilly say, ‘Mama can have some if she wants. Just a little piece, though. What do you put in here, Minny, that makes it taste so good?’

“I say ‘That good vanilla from Mexico’ and then I go head. I tell her what else I put in that pie for her.”

Miss Celia’s still as a stone staring at me, but I can’t meet her eyes now.

“Miss Walters, her mouth fall open. Nobody in that kitchen said anything for so long, I could a made it out the door fore they knew I’s gone. But then Miss Walters start laughing. Laugh so hard she almost fall out the chair. Say, ‘Well, Hilly, that’s what you get, I guess. And I wouldn’t go tattling on Minny either, or you’ll be known all over town as the lady who ate two slices of Minny’s shit.’ ”

I sneak a look up at Miss Celia. She’s staring wide-eyed, disgusted. I start to panic that I told her this. She’ll never trust me again. I walk over to the yellow chair and sit myself down.

“Miss Hilly thought you knew the story. That you were making fun a her. She never would a pounced on you