The Help

I sit quietly, my heart aching for Constantine. I am starting to dread what this has to do with my mother.

“Bout two years ago, Constantine get a letter from Lulabelle. I reckon she was twenty-five by then, and it said her adoptive parents give her the address. They start writing to each other and Lulabelle say she want a come down and stay with her awhile. Constantine, Law, she so nervous she couldn’t walk straight. Too nervous to eat, wouldn’t even take no water. Kept throwing it up. I had her on my prayer list.”

Two years ago. I was up at school then. Why didn’t Constantine tell me in her letters what was going on?

“She took all her savings and bought new clothes for Lulabelle, hair things, had the church bee sew her a new quilt for the bed Lula gone sleep in. She told us at prayer meeting, What if she hate me? She’s gone ask me why I give her away and if I tell her the truth . . . she’ll hate me for what I done.”

Aibileen looks up from her cup of tea, smiles a little. “She tell us, I can’t wait for Skeeter to meet her, when she get back home from school. I forgot about that. I didn’t know who Skeeter was, back then.”

I remember my last letter from Constantine, that she had a surprise for me. I realize now, she’d wanted to introduce me to her daughter. I swallow back tears coming up in my throat. “What happened when Lulabelle came down to see her?”

Aibileen slides the envelope across the table. “I reckon you ought a read that part at home.”

AT HOME, I GO UPSTAIRS. Without even stopping to sit down, I open Aibileen’s letter. It is on notebook paper, covering the front and back, written in cursive pencil.

Afterward, I stare at the eight pages I’ve already written about walking to Hotstack with Constantine, the puzzles we worked on together, her pressing her thumb in my hand. I take a deep breath and put my hands on the typewriter keys. I can’t waste any more time. I have to finish her story.

I write about what Aibileen told me, that Constantine had a daughter and had to give her up so she could work for our family—the Millers I call us, after Henry, my favorite banned author. I don’t put in that Constantine’s daughter was high yellow; I just want to show that Constantine’s love for me began with missing her own child. Perhaps that’s what made it so unique, so deep. It didn’t matter that I was white. While she was wanting her own daughter back, I was longing for Mother not to be disappointed in me.

For two days, I write all the way through my childhood, my college years, where we sent letters to each other every week. But then I stop and listen to Mother coughing downstairs. I hear Daddy’s footsteps, going to her. I light a cigarette and stub it out, thinking, Don’t start up again. The toilet water rushes through the house, filled with a little more of my mother’s body. I light another cigarette and smoke it down to my fingers. I can’t write about what’s in Aibileen’s letter.

That afternoon, I call Aibileen at home. “I can’t put it in the book,” I tell her. “About Mother and Constantine. I’ll end it when I go to college. I just . . .”

“Miss Skeeter—”

“I know I should. I know I should be sacrificing as much as you and Minny and all of you. But I can’t do that to my mother.”

“No one expects you to, Miss Skeeter. Truth is, I wouldn’t think real high a you if you did.”

THE NEXT EVENING, I go to the kitchen for some tea.

“Eugenia? Are you downstairs?”

I tread back to Mother’s room. Daddy’s not in bed yet. I hear the television on out in the relaxing room. “I’m here, Mama.”

She is in bed at six in the evening, the white bowl by her side. “Have you been crying? You know how that ages your skin, dear.”

I sit in the straight cane chair beside her bed. I think about how I should begin. Part of me understands why Mother acted the way she did, because really, wouldn’t anyone be angry about what Lulabelle did? But I need to hear my mother’s side of the story. If there’s anything redeeming about my mother that Aibileen left out of the letter, I want to know.

“I want to talk about Constantine,” I say.

“Oh Eugenia,” Mother chides and pats my hand. “That was almost two years ago.”

“Mama,” I say and make myself look into her eyes. Even though she is terribly thin and her collarbone is long and narrow beneath her skin, her eyes are still as sharp as ever. “What happened? What happened with her daughter?”

Mother’s jaw tightens and I can tell she’s surprised that I know about her. I wait for her to refuse to talk about it, as before. She takes a deep breath, moves the white bowl a little closer to her, says, “Constantine sent her up to Chicago to live. She couldn’t take care of her.”

I nod and wait.

“They’re different that way, you know. Those people have children and don’t think about the consequences until it’s too late.”

They, those people. It reminds me of Hilly. Mother sees it on my face, too.

“Now you look, I was good to Constantine. Oh, she talked back plenty of times and I put up with it. But Skeeter, she didn’t give me a choice this time.”

“I know, Mother. I know what happened.”

“Who told you? Who else knows about this?” I see the paranoia rising in Mother’s eyes. It is her greatest fear coming true, and I feel sorry for her.

“I will never tell you who told me. All I can say is, it was no one . . . important to you,” I say. “I can’t believe you would do that, Mother.”

“How dare you judge me, after what she did. Do you really know what happened? Were you there?” I see the old anger, an obstinate woman who’s survived years of bleeding ulcers.

“That girl—” She shakes her knobby finger at me. “She showed up here. I had the entire DAR chapter at the house. You were up at school and the doorbell was ringing nonstop and Constantine was in the kitchen, making all that coffee over since the old percolator burned the first two pots right up.” Mother waves away the remembered reek of scorched coffee. “They were all in the living room having cake, ninety-five people in the house, and she’s drinking coffee. She’s talking to Sarah von Sistern and walking around the house like a guest and sticking cake in her mouth and then she’s filling out the form to become a member.”

Again I nod. Maybe I didn’t know those details, but they don’t change what happened.

“She looked white as anybody, and she knew it too. She knew exactly what she was doing and so I say, How do you do? and she laughs and says, Fine, so I say, And what is your name? and she says, You mean you don’t know? I’m Lulabelle Bates. I’m grown now and I’ve moved back in with Mama. I got here yesterday morning. And then she goes over to help herself to another piece of cake.”

“Bates,” I say, because this is another detail I didn’t know, albeit insignificant. “She changed her last name back to Constantine’s.”

“Thank God nobody heard her. But then she starts talking to Phoebe Miller, the president of the Southern States of the DAR, and I pulled her into the kitchen and I said, Lulabelle, you can’t stay here. You need to go on, and oh she looked at me haughty. She said, What, you don’t allow colored Negroes in your living room if we’re not cleaning up? That’s when Constantine walks in the kitchen and she looks as shocked as I am. I say, Lulabelle, you get out of this house before I call Mister Phelan, but she won’t budge. Says, when I thought she was white, I treated her fine and dandy. Says up in Chicago, she’s part of some black cat group so I tell Constantine, I say, You get your daughter out of my house right now.”

Mother’s eyes seem more deep-set than ever. Her nostrils are flaring.

“So Constantine, she tells Lulabelle to go on back to their house, and Lulabelle says, Fine, I was leaving anyway, and heads for the dining room and of course I stop her. Oh no, I say, you go out the back door, not the front with the white guests. I was not about to have the DAR find out about this. And I told that bawdy girl, whose own mama we gave ten