I stand up, try to get practical. I know where I’l put it—in the white garbage pail next to the toilet. Then throw the whole thing out. But what wil I use to get it out with? My hand?
I bite my lip, try to stay calm. Maybe I should just wait. Maybe…maybe the doctor wil want to take it with him when he comes! Examine it. If I
can get Miss Celia off it a few minutes, maybe I won’t have to deal with it at al .
“We look after it in a minute,” I say in that reassuring voice. “How far along you think you was?” I ease closer to the bowl, don’t dare stop
talking.
“Five months? I don’t know.” Miss Celia covers her face with a washrag. “I was taking a shower and I felt it pul ing down, hurting. So I set on
the toilet and it slipped out. Like it wanted out of me.” She starts sobbing again, her shoulders jerking forward over her body.
Careful y, I lower the toilet lid down and settle back on the floor.
“Like it’d rather be dead than stand being inside me another second.”
“Now you look a here, that’s just God’s way. Something ain’t going right in your innards, nature got to do something about it. Second time,
you gone catch.” But then I think about those bottles and feel a ripple of anger.
“That was…the second time.”
“Oh Lordy.”
“We got married cause I was pregnant,” Miss Celia says, “but it…it slipped out too.”
I can’t hold it in another second. “Then why in the heck are you drinking? You know you can’t hold no baby with a pint of whiskey in you.”
“Whiskey?”
Oh please. I can’t even look at her with that “what-whiskey?” look. At least the smel ’s not as bad with the lid closed. When is that fool doctor
coming?
“You thought I was…” She shakes her head. “It’s catch tonic.” She closes her eyes. “From a Choctaw over in Feliciana Parish…”
“Choctaw?” I blink. She is stupider than I ever imagined. “You can’t trust them Indians. Don’t you know we poisoned their corn? What if she
trying to poison you?”
“Doctor Tate said it’s just molasses and water,” she cries down into her towel. “But I had to try it. I had to.”
Wel . I’m surprised by how loose my body goes, how relieved I am by this. “There’s nothing wrong with taking your time, Miss Celia. Believe
me, I got five kids.”
“But Johnny wants kids now. Oh Minny.” She shakes her head. “What’s he going to do with me?”
“He gone get over it, that’s what. He gone forget these babies cause mens is real good at that. Get to hoping for the next one.”
“He doesn’t know about this one. Or the one before.”
“You said that’s why he married you.”
“That first time, he knew.” Miss Celia lets out a big sigh. “This time’s real y the…fourth.”
She stops crying and I don’t have any good things left to say. For a minute, we’re just two people wondering why things are the way they are.
“I kept thinking,” she whispers, “if I was real stil , if I brought somebody in to do the house and the cooking, maybe I could hold on to this one.”
She cries down into her towel. “I wanted this baby to look just like Johnny.”
“Mister Johnny a good-looking man. Got good hair…”
Miss Celia lowers the towel from her face.
I wave my hand in the air, realize what I’ve just done. “I got to get some air. Hot in here.”
“How do you know…?”
I look around, try to think of a lie, but final y I just sigh. “He knows. Mister Johnny came home and found me.”
“What?”
“Yes’m. He tel me not to tel you so you go right on thinking he’s proud a you. He love you so much, Miss Celia. I seen it in his face how
much.”
“But…how long has he known?”
“A few…months.”
“Months? Was he—was he upset that I’d lied?”
“Heck no. He even cal me up at home a few weeks later to make sure I didn’t have no plans to quit. Say he afraid he gone starve if I left.”
“Oh Minny,” she cries. “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry about everything.”
“I been in worse situations.” I’m thinking about the blue hair dye. Eating lunch in the freezing cold. And right now. There’s stil the baby in the
toilet that someone’s going to have to deal with.
“I don’t know what to do, Minny.”
“Doctor Tate tel you to keep trying, then I guess you keep trying.”
“He hol ers at me. Says I’m wasting my time in bed.” She shakes her head. “He’s a mean, awful man.”
She presses the towel hard against her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.” And the harder she cries, the whiter she turns.
I try to feed her a few more sips of Co-Cola but she won’t take it. She can’t hardly lift her hand to wave it away.
“I’m going to…be sick. I’m—”
I grab the garbage can, watch as Miss Celia vomits over it. And then I feel something wet on me and I look down and the blood’s coming so
fast now, it’s leaked over to where I’m sitting. Everytime she heaves, the blood pushes out of her. I know she losing more than a person can handle.
“Sit up, Miss Celia! Get a good breath, now,” I say, but she’s slumping against me.
“Nuh-uh, you don’t want a lay down. Come on.” I push her back up but she’s gone limp and I feel tears spring up in my eyes because that
damn doctor should be here by now. He should’ve sent an ambulance and in the twenty-five years I’ve been cleaning houses nobody ever tel s you
what to do when your white lady keels over dead on top of you.
“Come on, Miss Celia!” I scream, but she’s a soft white lump next to me, and there is nothing I can do but sit and tremble and wait.
Many minutes pass before the back bel rings. I prop Miss Celia’s head on a towel, take off my shoes so I don’t track the blood over the
house, and run for the door.
“She done passed out!” I tel the doctor, and the nurse pushes past me and heads to the back like she knows her way around. She pul s the
smel ing salts out and puts them under Miss Celia’s nose and Miss Celia jerks her head, lets out a little cry, and opens her eyes.
The nurse helps me get Miss Celia out of her bloody nightgown. She’s got her eyes open but can hardly stand up. I put old towels down in
the bed and we lay her down. I go in the kitchen where Doctor Tate’s washing his hands.
“She in the bedroom,” I say. Not the kitchen, you snake. He’s in his fifties, Doctor Tate, and tops me by a good foot and a half. He has real
white skin and this long, narrow face that shows no feelings at al . Final y he goes back to the bedroom.
Just before he opens the door, I touch him on the arm. “She don’t want her husband to know. He ain’t gone find out, is he?”
He looks at me like I’m a nigger and says, “You don’t think it’s his business?” He walks into the bedroom and shuts the door in my face.
I go to the kitchen and pace the floor. Half an hour passes, then an hour, and I’m worrying so hard that Mister Johnny’s going to come home
and find out, worrying Doctor Tate wil cal him, worrying they’re going to leave that baby in the bowl for me to deal with, my head’s throbbing. Final y, I hear Doctor Tate open the door.
“She alright?”
“She’s hysterical. I gave her a pil to calm her down.”
The nurse walks around us and out the back door carrying a white tin box. I breathe out for what feels like the first time in hours.
“You watch her tomorrow,” he says and hands me a white paper bag. “Give her another pil if she gets too agitated. There’l be more
bleeding. But don’t cal me up unless it’s heavy.�
�
“You ain’t real y gone tel Mister Johnny bout this, are you, Doctor Tate?”
He lets out a sick hiss. “You make sure she doesn’t miss her appointment on Friday. I’m not driving al the way out here just because she’s
too lazy to come in.”
He waltzes out and slams the door behind him.
The kitchen clock reads five o’clock. Mister Johnny’s going to be home in half an hour. I grab the Clorox and the rags and a bucket.
MISS SKEETER
CHAPTER 19
IT IS 1963. The Space Age they’re cal ing it. A man has circled the earth in a rocketship. They’ve invented a pil so married women don’t have to get pregnant. A can of beer opens with a single finger instead of a can opener. Yet my parents’ house is stil as hot as it was in 1899, the year Great-grandfather built it.
“Mama, please,” I beg, “when are we going to get air-conditioning?”
“We have survived this long without electric cool and I have no intentions of setting one of those tacky contraptions in my window.”
And so, as July wanes on, I am forced from my attic bedroom to a cot on the screened back porch. When we were kids, Constantine used to
sleep out here with Carlton and me in the summer, when Mama and Daddy went to out-of-town weddings. Constantine slept in an old-fashioned
white nightgown up to her chin and down to her toes even though it’d be hot as Hades. She used to sing to us so we’d go to sleep. Her voice was
so beautiful I couldn’t understand how she’d never had lessons. Mother had always told me a person can’t learn anything without proper lessons. It’s
just unreal to me that she was here, right here on this porch, and now she’s not. And no one wil tel me a thing. I wonder if I’l ever see her again.
Next to my cot, now, my typewriter sits on a rusted, white enamel washtable. Underneath is my red satchel. I take Daddy’s hankie and wipe
my forehead, press salted ice to my wrists. Even on the back porch, the Avery Lumber Company temperature dial rises from 89 to 96 to a nice
round 100 degrees. Luckily, Stuart doesn’t come over during the day, when the heat is at its worst.
I stare at my typewriter with nothing to do, nothing to write. Minny’s stories are finished and typed already. It’s a wretched feeling. Two weeks
ago, Aibileen told me that Yule May, Hil y’s maid, might help us, that she shows a little more interest every time Aibileen talks to her. But with
Medgar Evers’s murder and colored people getting arrested and beat by the police, I’m sure she’s scared to death by now.
Maybe I ought to go over to Hil y’s and ask Yule May myself. But no, Aibileen’s right, I’d probably scare her even more and ruin any chance
we have.
Under the house, the dogs yawn, whine in the heat. One lets out a half hearted woof as Daddy’s field workers, five Negroes, pul up in a
truckbed. The men jump from the tailgate, hoofing up dust when they hit the dirt. They stand a moment, dead-faced, stupefied. The foreman drags a
red cloth across his black forehead, his lips, his neck. It is so recklessly hot, I don’t know how they can stand baking out there in the sun.
In a rare breeze, my copy of Life magazine flutters. Audrey Hepburn smiles on the cover, no sweat beading on her upper lip. I pick it up and
finger the wrinkled pages, flip to the story on the Soviet Space Girl. I already know what’s on the next page. Behind her face is a picture of Carl
Roberts, a colored schoolteacher from Pelahatchie, forty miles from here. “In April, Carl Roberts told Washington reporters what it means to be a
black man in Mississippi, cal ing the governor ‘a pathetic man with the morals of a streetwalker.’ Roberts was found cattle-branded and hung from a
pecan tree.”
They’d kil ed Carl Roberts for speaking out, for talking. I think about how easy I thought it would be, three months ago, to get a dozen maids
to talk to me. Like they’d just been waiting, al this time, to spil their stories to a white woman. How stupid I’d been.
When I can’t take the heat another second, I go sit in the only cool place on Longleaf. I turn on the ignition and rol up the windows, pul my
dress up around my underwear and let the bi-level blow on me ful blast. As I lean my head back, the world drifts away, tinged by the smel of Freon
and Cadil ac leather. I hear a truck pul up into the front drive but I don’t open my eyes. A second later, my passenger door opens.
“Damn it feels good in here.”
I push my dress down. “What are you doing here?”
Stuart shuts the door, kisses me quickly on the lips. “I only have a minute. I have to head down to the coast for a meeting.”
“For how long?”
“Three days. I’ve got to catch some fel a on the Mississippi Oil and Gas Board. I wish I’d known about it sooner.”
He reaches out and takes my hand and I smile. We’ve been going out twice a week for two months now if you don’t count the horror date. I
guess that’s considered a short time to other girls. But it’s the longest thing that’s ever happened to me, and right now it feels like the best.
“Wanna come?” he says.
“To Biloxi? Right now?”
“Right now,” he says and puts his cool palm on my leg. As always, I jump a little. I look down at his hand, then up to make sure Mother’s not
spying on us.
“Come on, it’s too damn hot here. I’m staying at the Edgewater, right on the beach.”
I laugh and it feels good after al the worrying I’ve done these past weeks. “You mean, at the Edgewater…together? In the same room?”
He nods. “Think you can get away?”
Elizabeth would be mortified by the thought of sharing a room with a man before she was married, Hil y would tel me I was stupid to even
consider it. They’d held on to their virginity with the fierceness of children refusing to share their toys. And yet, I consider it.
Stuart moves closer to me. He smel s like pine trees and fired tobacco, expensive soap the likes of which my family’s never known.
“Mama’d have a fit, Stuart, plus I have al this other stuff to do…” But God, he smel s good. He’s looking at me like he wants to eat me up and I
shiver under the blast of Cadil ac air.
“You sure?” he whispers and he kisses me then, on the mouth, not so politely as before. His hand is stil on the upper quarter of my thigh and
I find myself wondering again if he was like this with his fiancée, Patricia. I don’t even know if they went to bed together. The thought of them
touching makes me feel sick and I pul back from him.
“I just…I can’t,” I say. “You know I couldn’t tel Mama the truth…”
He lets out a long sorry sigh and I love that look on his face, that disappointment. I understand now why girls resist, just for that sweet look of
regret. “Don’t lie to her,” he says. “You know I hate lies.”
“Wil you cal me from the hotel?” I ask.
“I wil ,” he says. “I’m sorry I have to leave so soon. Oh, and I almost forgot, in three weeks, Saturday night. Mother and Daddy want y’al to
come have supper.”
I sit up straighter. I’ve never met his parents before. “What do you mean…y’al ?”
“You and your parents. Come into town, meet my family.”
“But…why al of us?”
He shrugs. “My parents want to meet them. And I want them to meet you.”
“But…”
“I’m sorry, baby,” he says and pushes my hair behind my ear, “I have to go. Cal you tomorrow night?”
I nod. He climbs out into the heat and drives off, waving to Daddy walking up the dusty lane.
I’m left alone in the Cadil ac to worry. Supper at the state senator’s house. With Mother there asking a thousand questio
ns. Looking
desperate on my behalf. Bringing up cotton trust funds.
THREE EXCRUCIATINGLY LONG, hot nights later, with stil no word from Yule May or any other maids, Stuart comes over, straight from his meeting on the
coast. I’m sick of sitting at the typewriter typing nothing but newsletters and Miss Myrna. I run down the steps and he hugs me like it’s been weeks.
Stuart’s sunburned beneath his white shirt, the back wrinkled from driving, the sleeves rol ed up. He wears a perpetual, almost devilish
smile. We both sit straight up on opposite sides of the relaxing room, staring at each other. We’re waiting for Mother to go to bed. Daddy went to
sleep when the sun went down.
Stuart’s eyes hang on mine while Mother waxes on about the heat, how Carlton’s final y met “the one.”
“And we’re thril ed about dining with your parents, Stuart. Please do tel your mother I said so.”
“Yes ma’am. I sure wil .”
He smiles over at me again. There are so many things I love about him. He looks me straight in the eye when we talk. His palms are
cal used but his nails are clean and trimmed. I love the rough feeling on my neck. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s nice to have someone to go to weddings and parties with. Not to have to endure the look in Raleigh Leefolt’s eyes when he sees that I’m tagging along again. The sul en
daze when he has to carry my coat with Elizabeth’s, fetch me a drink too.
Then there is Stuart at the house. From the minute he walks in, I am protected, exempt. Mother won’t criticize me in front of him, for fear he
might notice my flaws himself. She won’t nag me in front of him because she knows that I’d act badly, whine. Short my chances. It’s al a big game
to Mother, to show only one side of me, that the real me shouldn’t come out until after it’s “too late.”
Final y, at half past nine, Mother smoothes her skirt, folds a blanket slowly and perfectly, like a cherished letter. “Wel , I guess it’s time for
bed. I’l let you young people alone. Eugenia?” She eyes me. “Not too late, now?”
I smile sweetly. I am twenty-three goddamn years old. “Of course not, Mama.”
She leaves and we sit, staring, smiling.
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