THAT NIGHT, as usual, I go to Aibileen’s. I tell her about the deadline of only ten days, and she looks like she might cry. Then I hand her Louvenia’s chapter to read, the one I’ve written at lightning speed. Minny is at the kitchen table with us, drinking a Coke, looking out the window. I hadn’t known she’d be here tonight and wish she’d leave us to work.
Aibileen puts it down, nods. “I think this chapter is right good. Read just as well as the slow-wrote ones.”
I sigh, leaning back in my chair, thinking of what else needs to be done. “We need to decide on the title,” I say and rub my temples. “I’ve been working on a few. I think we should call it
Colored Domestics and the Southern Families for Which They Work.
”
“Say what?” Minny says, looking at me for the first time.
“That’s the best way to describe it, don’t you think?” I say.
“If you got a corn cob up you butt.”
“This isn’t fiction, Minny. It’s sociology. It has to sound exact.”
“But that don’t mean it have to sound boring,” Minny says.
“Aibileen,” I sigh, hoping we can resolve this tonight. “What do you think?”
Aibileen shrugs and I can see already, she’s putting on her peace-making smile. It seems she has to smooth things over every time Minny and I are in the same room. “That’s a good title. A course you gone get tired a typing all that on top a ever page,” she says. I’d told her this is how it has to be done.
“Well, we could shorten it a little . . .” I say and pull out my pencil.
Aibileen scratches her nose, says, “What you think about just calling it . . .
Help
?”
“
Help
,” Minny repeats, like she’s never heard of the word.
“
Help
,” I say.
Aibileen shrugs, looks down shyly, like she’s a little embarrassed. “I ain’t trying to take over your idea, I just... I like to keep things simple, you know?”
“I guess
Help
sound alright to me,” Minny says and crosses her arms.
“I like . . .
Help
,” I say, because I really do. I add, “I think we’ll still have to put the description underneath, so the category’s clear, but I think that’s a good title.”
“Good is right,” Minny says. “Cause if this thing gets printed, Lord knows we gone need some.”
On SUNDAY AFTERNOON, with eight days left, I come downstairs, dizzy and blinking from staring at pica type all day. I was almost glad when I heard Stuart’s car pull up the drive. I rub my eyes. Maybe I’ll sit with him awhile, clear my head, then go back and work through the night.
Stuart climbs out of his mud-splattered truck. He’s still in his Sunday tie and I try to ignore how handsome he looks. I stretch my arms. It’s ridiculously warm out, considering Christmas is in two and a half weeks. Mother’s sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, swathed in blankets.
“Hello, Missus Phelan. How are you feeling today?” Stuart asks.
Mother gives him a regal nod. “Fair. Thank you for asking.” I’m surprised by the coolness in her voice. She turns back to her newsletter and I can’t help but smile. Mother knows he’s been stopping by but she hasn’t mentioned it but once. I have to wonder when it will come.
“Hey,” he says to me quietly and we sit on the bottom porch step. Silently, we watch our old cat Sherman sneak around a tree, his tail swaying, going after some creature we can’t see.
Stuart puts his hand on my shoulder. “I can’t stay today. I’m heading to Dallas right now for an oil meeting and I’ll be gone three days,” he says. “I just came by to tell you.”
“Alright.” I shrug, like it makes no difference.
“Alright then,” he says and gets back in his truck.
When he has disappeared, Mother clears her throat. I don’t turn around and look at her in the rocking chair. I don’t want her to see the disappointment in my face that he’s gone.
“Go ahead, Mother,” I finally mutter. “Say what you want to say.”
“Don’t you let him cheapen you.”
I look back at her, eye her suspiciously, even though she is so frail under the wool blanket. Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
“If Stuart doesn’t know how intelligent and kind I raised you to be, he can march straight on back to State Street.” She narrows her eyes out at the winter land. “Frankly, I don’t care much for Stuart. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to have you.”
I let Mother’s words sit like a tiny, sweet candy on my tongue. Forcing myself up from the step, I head for the front door. There is so much work to be done and not nearly enough time.
“Thank you, Mother.” I kiss her softly on the cheek and go inside.
I’M EXHAUSTED and IRRITABLE. For forty-eight hours I’ve done nothing but type. I am stupid with facts about other people’s lives. My eyes sting from the smell of typing ink. My fingers are striped with paper cuts. Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious.
With just six days left, I go over to Aibileen’s. She’s taken a weekday off from work, despite Elizabeth’s annoyance. I can tell she knows what we need to discuss before I even say it. She leaves me in the kitchen and comes back with a letter in her hand.
“Fore I give this to you . . . I think I ought to tell you some things. So you can really understand.”
I nod. I am tense in my chair. I want to tear the envelope open and get this over with.
Aibileen straightens her notebook that’s sitting on the kitchen table. I watch as she aligns her two yellow pencils. “Remember, I told you Constantine had a daughter. Well, Lulabelle was her name. Law, she come out pale as snow. Grew hair the color a hay. Not curly like yours. Straight it was.”
“She was that white?” I ask. I’ve wondered this ever since Aibileen told me about Constantine’s child, way back in Elizabeth’s kitchen. I think about how surprised Constantine must’ve been to hold a white baby and know it was hers.
She nods. “When Lulabelle was four years old, Constantine . . .” Aibileen shifts in her chair. “She take her to a . . . orphanage. Up in Chicago.”
“An orphanage? You mean . . . she gave her baby away?” As much as Constantine loved me, I can only imagine how much she must’ve loved her own child.
Aibileen looks me straight in the eye. I see something there I rarely see—frustration, antipathy. “A lot a colored womens got to give they children up, Miss Skeeter. Send they kids off cause they have to tend to a white family.”
I look down, wondering if Constantine couldn’t take care of her child because she had to take care of us.
“But most send em off to family. A orphanage is... different altogether.”
“Why didn’t she send the baby to her sister’s? Or another relative?”
“Her sister...she just couldn’t handle it. Being Negro with white skin . . . in Mississippi, it’s like you don’t belong to nobody. But it wasn’t just hard on the girl. It was hard on Constantine. She . . . folks would look at her. White folks would stop her, ask her all suspicious what she doing toting round a white child. Policeman used to stop her on State Street, told her she need to get her uniform on. Even colored folks . . . they treat her different, distrustful, like she done something wrong. It was hard for her to find somebody to watch Lulabelle while she at work. Constantine got to where she didn’t want to bring Lula . . . out much.”
“Was she already working for my mother then?”
“She’d been with your mama a few years. That’s where she met the father, Connor. He worked on your farm, lived back there in Hotstack.” Aibileen shakes her head. “We was all surprised Constantine would go and... get herself in the family way. Some folks at church wasn’t so kind about it, especially when the baby come out white. Even though the father was black as me.”
“I’m sure Mother wasn’t too pleased, either.” Mother, I’m sure, knew all about it. She’s always kept tabs on all the colored help and their situations— where they live, if they’re married, how many children they have. It’s more of a control thing than a real interest. She wants to know who’s walking around her property.
“Was it a colored orphanage or a white one?” Because I am thinking, I am hoping, maybe Constantine just wanted a better life for her child. Maybe she thought she’d be adopted by a white family and not feel so different.
“Colored. White ones wouldn’t take her, I heard. I guess they knew... maybe they seen that kind a thing before.
“When Constantine went to the train station with Lulabelle to take her up there, I heard white folks was staring on the platform, wanting to know why a little white girl was going in the colored car. And when Constantine left her at the place up in Chicago . . . four is . . . pretty old to get given up. Lulabelle was screaming. That’s what Constantine told somebody at our church. Said Lula was screaming and thrashing, trying to get her mama to come back to her. But Constantine, even with that sound in her ears . . . she left her there.”
As I listen, it starts to hit me, what Aibileen is telling me. If I hadn’t had the mother I have, I might not have thought it. “She gave her up because she was . . . ashamed? Because her daughter was white?”
Aibileen opens her mouth to disagree, but then she closes it, looks down. “A few years later, Constantine wrote the orphanage, told em she made a mistake, she wanted her girl back. But Lula been adopted already. She was gone. Constantine always said giving her child away was the worst mistake she’d ever made in her life.” Aibileen leans back in her chair. “And she said if she ever got Lulabelle back, she’d never let her go.”
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?”