The Help (10 page)

“Hi-do, Carl Bird,” Constantine’d holler at the root-selling man sitting in his rocking chair on the back of his pickup. Bags of sassafras and licorice root and birdeye vine sat open for bargaining, and by the time we poked around those a minute, Constantine’s whole body’d be rambling and loose in the joints. Constantine wasn’t just tall, she was stout. She was also wide in the hips and her knees gave her trouble all the time. At the stump on her corner, she would stick a pinch of Happy Days snuff in her lip and spit juice straight as an arrow. She’d let me look at the black powder in its round tin, but say, “Don’t tell your mama, now.”

There were always dogs, hollow-stomached and mangy, laid out in the road. From a porch a young colored woman named Cat-Bite would holler, “Miss Skeeter! Tell your daddy hey for me. Tell him I’s doing fine.” My own daddy gave her that name years ago. Drove by and saw a rabid cat attacking a little colored girl. “That cat near about ate her up,” Daddy’d told me afterward. He’d killed the cat, carried the girl to the doctor, and set her up for the twenty-one days of rabies shots.

A little farther on, we’d get to Constantine’s house. It had three rooms and no rugs and I’d look at the single photograph she had, of a white girl she told me she looked after for twenty years over in Port Gibson. I was pretty sure I knew everything about Constantine—she had one sister and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Corinth, Mississippi. Both her parents were dead. She didn’t eat pork as a rule and wore a size sixteen dress and a size ten ladies’ shoe. But I used to stare at the toothy smile of that child in the picture, a little jealous, wondering why she didn’t have a picture of me up too.

Sometimes two girls from next door would come over to play with me, named Mary Nell and Mary Roan. They were so black I couldn’t tell them apart and called them both just Mary.

“Be nice to the little colored girls when you’re down there,” Mother said to me one time and I remember looking at her funny, saying, “Why wouldn’t I be?” But Mother never explained.

After an hour or so, Daddy would pull up, get out, hand Constantine a dollar. Not once did Constantine invite him inside. Even back then, I understood we were on Constantine’s turf and she didn’t have to be nice to anybody at her own house. Afterward, Daddy would let me go in the colored store for a cold drink and sucking candy.

“Don’t tell your mama I gave Constantine a little extra, now.”

“Okay, Daddy,” I’d say. That’s about the only secret my daddy and I have ever shared.

 

 

 

THE FIRST TIME I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton’s, over to shoot guns in the field.

“Why you crying, girl?” Constantine asked me in the kitchen.

I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.

“Well? Is you?”

I blinked, paused my crying. “Is I what?”

“Now you look a here, Eugenia”—because Constantine was the only one who’d occasionally follow Mama’s rule. “Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I sobbed.

Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, something we both knew meant
Listen. Listen to me.

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.” Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. “You gone have to ask yourself,
Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?
”

She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother’s white child. All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

 

 

 

CONSTANTINE CAME TO WORK in our house at six in the morning, and at harvest time, she came at five. That way she could fix Daddy his biscuits and gravy before he headed to the field. I woke up nearly every day to her standing in the kitchen, Preacher Green playing on the radio that sat on the kitchen table. The minute she saw me, she smiled. “Good morning, beautiful girl!” I’d sit at the kitchen table and tell her what I’d dreamed. She claimed dreams told the future.

“I was in the attic, looking down at the farm,” I’d tell her. “I could see the tops of the trees.”

“You gone be a brain surgeon! Top a the house mean the head.”

Mother ate her breakfast early in the dining room, then moved to the relaxing room to do needlepoint or write letters to missionaries in Africa. From her green wing chair, she could see everyone going almost anywhere in the house. It was shocking what she could process about my appearance in the split second it took for me to pass by that door. I used to dash by, feeling like a dartboard, a big red bull’s-eye that Mother pinged darts at.

“Eugenia, you know there is no chewing gum in this house.”

“Eugenia, go put alcohol on that blemish.”

“Eugenia, march upstairs and brush your hair down, what if we have an unexpected visitor?”

I learned that socks are stealthier transportation than shoes. I learned to use the back door. I learned to wear hats, cover my face with my hands when I passed by. But mostly, I learned to just stay in the kitchen.

 

 

 

A SUMMER MONTH COULD STRECH on for years, out on Longleaf. I didn’t have friends coming over every day—we lived too far out to have any white neighbors. In town, Hilly and Elizabeth spent all weekend going to and from each other’s houses, while I was only allowed to spend the night out or have company every other weekend. I grumbled over this plenty. I took Constantine for granted at times, but I think I knew, for the most part, how lucky I was to have her there.

When I was fourteen, I started smoking cigarettes. I’d sneak them from Carlton’s packs of Marlboros he kept in his dresser drawer. He was almost eighteen and no one minded that he’d been smoking for years anywhere he wanted to in the house or out in the fields with Daddy. Sometimes Daddy smoked a pipe, but he wasn’t a cigarette man and Mother didn’t smoke anything at all, even though most of her friends did. Mother told me I wasn’t allowed to smoke until I was seventeen.

So I’d slip into the backyard and sit in the tire swing, with the huge old oak tree concealing me. Or, late at night, I’d hang out of my bedroom window and smoke. Mother had eagle-eyes, but she had almost zero sense of smell. Constantine knew immediately, though. She narrowed her eyes, with a little smile, but said nothing. If Mother headed to the back porch while I was behind the tree, Constantine would rush out and bang her broom handle on the iron stair rail.

“Constantine, what are you doing?” Mother would ask her, but by then I would’ve stubbed it out and dropped the butt in the hole in the tree.

“Just cleaning this here old broom, Miss Charlotte.”

“Well, find a way to do it a little quieter, please. Oh, Eugenia, what, did you grow another inch overnight? What am I going to do? Go... put on a dress that fits.”

“Yes ma’am,” Constantine and I would say at the same time and then pass each other a little smile.

Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with. If I’d had a sister or a brother closer in age, I guessed that’s what it would be like. But it wasn’t just smoking or skirting around Mother. It was having someone look at you after your mother has nearly fretted herself to death because you are freakishly tall and frizzy and odd. Someone whose eyes simply said, without words,
You are fine with me.

Still, it wasn’t all sweet talk with her. When I was fifteen, a new girl had pointed at me and asked, “Who’s the stork?” Even Hilly had tucked back a smile before steering me away, like we hadn’t heard her.

“How tall are you, Constantine?” I asked, unable to hide my tears.

Constantine narrowed her eyes at me. “How tall is you?”

“Five-eleven,” I cried. “I’m already taller than the boys’ basketball coach.”

“Well, I’m five-thirteen, so quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

Constantine’s the only woman I’ve ever had to look up to, to look her straight in the eye.

What you noticed first about Constantine, besides her tallness, were her eyes. They were light brown, strikingly honey-colored against her dark skin. I’ve never seen light brown eyes on a colored person. In fact, the shades of brown on Constantine were endless. Her elbows were absolutely black, with a dry white dust on them in the winter. The skin on her arms and neck and face was a dark ebony. The palms of her hands were orangey-tan and that made me wonder if the soles of her feet were too, but I never saw her barefooted.

“Just you and me this weekend,” she said with a smile.

It was the weekend that Mother and Daddy were driving Carlton to look at LSU and Tulane. My brother was going to college next year. That morning, Daddy had moved the cot into the kitchen, next to her bathroom. That’s where Constantine always slept when she spent the night.

“Go look what I got,” she said, pointing to the broom closet. I went and opened it and saw, tucked in her bag, a five-hundred-piece puzzle with a picture of Mount Rushmore on it. It was our favorite thing to do when she stayed over.

That night, we sat for hours, munching on peanuts, sifting through the pieces spread out on the kitchen table. A storm raged outside, making the room cozy while we picked out the edges. The bulb in the kitchen dimmed then brightened again.

“Which one he?” Constantine asked, studying the puzzle box through her black-rimmed glasses.

“That’s Jefferson.”

“Oh it sure is. What about him?”

“That’s—” I leaned over. “I think that’s . . . Roosevelt.”

“Only one I recognize is Lincoln. He look like my daddy.”

I stopped, puzzle piece in hand. I was fourteen and had never made less than an A. I was smart, but I was as naïve as they come. Constantine put the box top down and looked over the pieces again.

“Because your daddy was so . . . tall?” I asked.

She chuckled. “Cause my daddy was white. I got the tall from my mama.”

I put the piece down. “Your . . . father was white and your mother was . . . colored?”

“Yup,” she said and smiled, snapping two pieces together. “Well, look a there. Got me a match.”

I had so many questions—
Who
was he?
Where
was he? I knew he wasn’t married to Constantine’s mother, because that was against the law. I picked a cigarette from my stash I’d brought to the table. I was fourteen but, feeling very grown up, I lit it. As I did, the overhead light dimmed to a dull, dirty brown, buzzing softly.

“Oh, my daddy looooved me. Always said I was his favorite.” She leaned back in her chair. “He used to come over to the house ever Saturday afternoon, and one time, he give me a set a ten hair ribbons, ten different colors. Brought em over from Paris, made out a Japanese silk. I sat in his lap from the minute he got there until he had to leave and Mama’d play Bessie Smith on the Victrola he brung her and he and me’d sing:

I listened wide-eyed, stupid. Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would’ve been Constantine’s voice singing. If singing was a color, it would’ve been the color of that chocolate.

“One time I was boo-hooing over hard feelings, I reckon I had a list a things to be upset about, being poor, cold baths, rotten tooth, I don’t know. But he held me by the head, hugged me to him for the longest time. When I looked up, he was crying too and he . . . did that thing I do to you so you know I mean it. Press his thumb up in my hand and he say . . . he sorry.”

We sat there, staring at the puzzle pieces. Mother wouldn’t want me to know this, that Constantine’s father was white, that he’d apologized to her for the way things were. It was something I wasn’t supposed to know. I felt like Constantine had given me a gift.

I finished my cigarette, stubbed it out in the silver guest ashtray. The light brightened again. Constantine smiled at me and I smiled back.

“How come you never told me this before?” I said, looking into her light brown eyes.

“I can’t tell you ever single thing, Skeeter.”

“But why?” She knew everything about me, everything about my family. Why would I ever keep secrets from her?

She stared at me and I saw a deep, bleak sadness there, inside of her. After a while, she said, “Some things I just got to keep for myself.”

 

 

 

WHEN IT Was MY Turn to go off to college, Mother cried her eyes out when Daddy and I pulled away in the truck. But I felt free. I was off the farm, out from under the criticism. I wanted to ask Mother,
Aren’t you glad? Aren’t you relieved that you don’t have to worry-wart over me every day anymore?
But Mother looked miserable.

I was the happiest person in my freshman dorm. I wrote Constantine a letter once a week, telling her about my room, the classes, the sorority. I had to mail her letters to the farm since the post didn’t deliver to Hotstack and I had to trust that Mother wouldn’t open them. Twice a month, Constantine wrote me back on parchment paper that folded into an envelope. Her handwriting was large and lovely, although it ran at a crooked angle down the page. She wrote me every mundane detail of Longleaf:
My back pains are bad but it’s my feet that are worse,
or
The mixer broke off from the bowl and flew wild around the kitchen and the cat hollered and ran off. I haven’t seen her since.
She’d tell me that Daddy had a chest cold or that Rosa Parks was coming to her church to speak. Often she demanded to know if I was happy and the details of this. Our letters were like a yearlong conversation, answering questions back and forth, continuing face-to-face at Christmas or between summer school sessions.