And then she say it, just like I need her to. “You is kind,” she say, “you is smart. You is important.”

“Oh Law.” I hug her hot little body to me. I feel like she done just given me a gift. “Thank you, Baby Girl.”

“You’re welcome,” she say, like I taught her to. But then she lay her head on my shoulder and we cry like that awhile, until Miss Leefolt come into the kitchen.

“Aibileen,” Miss Leefolt say real quiet.

“Miss Leefolt, are you . . . sure this what you . . .” Miss Hilly walk in behind her and glare at me. Miss Leefolt nods, looking real guilty.

“I’m sorry, Aibileen. Hilly, if you want to . . . press charges, that’s up to you.”

Miss Hilly sniff at me and say, “It’s not worth my time.”

Miss Leefolt sigh like she relieved. For a second, our eyes meet and I can see that Miss Hilly was right. Miss Leefolt ain’t got no idea Chapter Two is her. Even if she had a hint of it, she’d never admit to herself that was her.

I push back on Mae Mobley real gentle and she looks at me, then over at her mama through her sleepy, fever eyes. She look like she’s dreading the next fifteen years a her life, but she sighs, like she is just too tired to think about it. I put her down on her feet, give her a kiss on the forehead, but then she reaches out to me again. I have to back away.

I go in the laundry room, get my coat and my pocketbook.

I walk out the back door, to the terrible sound a Mae Mobley crying again. I start down the driveway, crying too, knowing how much I’m on miss Mae Mobley, praying her mama can show her more love. But at the same time feeling, in a way, that I’m free, like Minny. Freer than Miss Leefolt, who so locked up in her own head she don’t even recognize herself when she read it. And freer than Miss Hilly. That woman gone spend the rest a her life trying to convince people she didn’t eat that pie. I think about Yule May setting in jail. Cause Miss Hilly, she in her own jail, but with a lifelong term.

I head down the hot sidewalk at eight thirty in the morning wondering what I’m on do with the rest a my day. The rest a my life. I am shaking and crying and a white lady walk by frowning at me. The paper gone pay me ten dollars a week, and there’s the book money plus a little more coming. Still, it ain’t enough for me to live the rest a my life on. I ain’t gone be able to get no other job as a maid, not with Miss Leefolt and Miss Hilly calling me a thief. Mae Mobley was my last white baby. And here I just bought this new uniform.

The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open. I stand at the bus stop like I been doing for forty-odd years. In thirty minutes, my whole life’s . . . done. Maybe I ought to keep writing, not just for the paper, but something else, about all the people I know and the things I seen and done. Maybe I ain’t too old to start over, I think and I laugh and cry at the same time at this. Cause just last night I thought I was finished with everthing new.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Amy Einhorn, my editor, without whom the sticky-note business would not be the success it is today. Amy, you are so wise. I am truly lucky to have worked with you.

Thank you to: my agent, Susan Ramer, for taking a chance and being so patient with me; Alexandra Shelley for her tenacious editing and diligent advice; The Jane Street Workshop for being such fine writers; Ruth Stockett, Tate Taylor, Brunson Green, Laura Foote, Octavia Spencer, Nicole Love, and Justine Story for reading and laughing, even at the parts that weren’t that funny. Thank you to Grandaddy, Sam, Barbara, and Robert Stockett for helping me remember the old Jackson days. And my deepest thanks to Keith Rogers and my dear Lila, for everything.

Thank you to everyone at Putnam for their enthusiasm and hard work. I took liberties with time, using the song “The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ” even though it was not released until 1964, and Shake ’n Bake, which did not hit the shelves until 1965. The Jim Crow laws that appear in the book were abbreviated and taken from actual legislation that existed, at various times, across the South. Many thanks to Dorian Hastings and Elizabeth Wagner, the incredibly detailed copy editors, for pointing out these, my stubborn discrepancies, and helping me repair many others.

Thank you to Susan Tucker, author of the book Telling Memories Among Southern Women, whose beautiful oral accounts of domestics and white employers took me back to a time and place that is long gone.

Finally, my belated thanks to Demetrie McLorn, who carried us all out of the hospital wrapped in our baby blankets and spent her life feeding us, picking up after us, loving us, and, thank God, forgiving us.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

Our family maid, Demetrie, used to say picking cotton in Mississippi in the dead of summer is about the worst pastime there is, if you don’t count picking okra, another prickly, low-growing thing. Demetrie used to tell us all kinds of stories about picking cotton as a girl. She’d laugh and shake her finger at us, warning us against it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fall to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.

“For days I picked and picked. And then I looked down and my skin had bubbled up. I showed my mama. None a us ever seen sunburn on a black person before. That was for white people!”

I was too young to realize that what she was telling us wasn’t very funny. Demetrie was born in Lampkin, Mississippi, in 1927. It was a horrifying year to be born, just before the Depression set in. Right on time for a child to appreciate, in fine detail, what it felt like to be poor, colored, and female on a sharecropping farm.

Demetrie came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty-eight. My father was fourteen, my uncle seven. Demetrie was stout and dark-skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Clyde. She wouldn’t answer me when I asked questions about him. But besides the subject of Clyde, she’d talk to us all day.

And God, how I loved to talk to Demetrie. After school, I’d sit in my grandmother’s kitchen with her, listening to her stories and watching her mix up cakes and fry chicken. Her cooking was outstanding. It was something people discussed at length after they ate at my grandmother’s table. You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie’s caramel cake.

But my older brother and sister and I weren’t allowed to bother Demetrie during her own lunch break. Grandmother would say, “Leave her alone now, let her eat, this is her time,” and I would stand in the kitchen doorway, itching to get back with her. Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest so she could finish her work, not to mention, white people didn’t sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now.

I didn’t pity Demetrie, though. There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house, cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own, and we felt like we were filling a void in her life. If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us: my sister, Susan, my brother, Rob, and me.

My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than the other kids were. Nobody got cross with me if Demetrie was nearby. She would stand me in front of the mirror and say, “You are beautiful. You a beautiful girl,” when clearly I was not. I wore glasses and had stringy brown hair. I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub. My mother was out of town a lot. Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around, and I felt left over. Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.