“Thank you, Aibileen. You have no idea how much this helps.”
“Ain’t no trouble. Long as Miss Leefolt don’t need me.”
I gather up my papers and take a last sip of my Coke, letting myself relax for five seconds before I have to go write the article. Aibileen picks through a sack of green fiddleheads. The room is quiet except for the radio playing softly, Preacher Green again.
“How did you know Constantine? Were you related?”
“We… in the same church circle.” Aibileen shifts her feet in front of the sink.
I feel what has become a familiar sting. “She didn’t even leave an address. I just – I can’t believe she quit like that.”
Aibileen keeps her eyes down. She seems to be studying the fiddleheads very carefully. “No, I’m right sure she was let go.”
“No, Mama said she quit. Back in April. Went to live up in Chicago with her people.”
Aibileen picks up another fiddlehead, starts washing its long stem, the curly green ends. “No ma’am,” she says after a pause.
It takes me a few seconds to realize what we’re talking about here.
“Aibileen,” I say, trying to catch her eye. “You really think Constantine was fired?”
But Aibileen’s face has gone blank as the blue sky. “I must be misrememoring,” she says and I can tell she thinks she’s said too much to a white woman.
We hear Mae Mobley calling out and Aibileen excuses herself and heads through the swinging door. A few seconds pass before I have the sense to go home.
When I walk in the house ten minutes later, Mother is reading at the dining room table.
“Mother,” I say, clutching my notebook to my chest, “did you fire Constantine?”
“Did I… what?” Mother asks. But I know she’s heard me because she’s set the DAR[57] newsletter down. It takes a hard question to pull her eyes off that riveting material.
“Eugenia, I told you, her sister was sick so she went up to Chicago to live with her people,” she says. “Why? Who told you different?”
I would never in a million years tell her it was Aibileen. “I heard it this afternoon. In town.”
“Who would talk about such a thing?” Mother narrows her eyes behind her reading glasses. “It must’ve been one of the other Nigras.”
“What did you do to her, Mother?”
Mother licks her lips, gives me a good, long look over her bifocals. “You wouldn’t understand, Eugenia. Not until you’ve hired help of your own.”
“You… fired her? For what?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s behind me now[58] and I just won’t think about it another minute.”
“Mother, she raised me. You tell me right now what happened!” I’m disgusted by the squeakiness of my voice, the childish sound of my demands.
Mother raises her eyebrows at my tone, takes her glasses off. “It was nothing but a colored thing. And that’s all I’m saying.” She puts her glasses back on and lifts her DAR sheet to her eyes.
I’m shaking, I’m so mad. I pound my way up the stairs. I sit at my typewriter, stunned that my mother could cast off someone who’d done her the biggest favor of her life, raise her children, teach me kindness and self-respect. I stare across my room at the rose wallpaper, the eyelet curtains, the yellowing photographs so familiar they are nearly contemptible.
Constantine worked for our family for twenty-nine years.
For the next week, Daddy rises before dawn. I wake to truck motors, the noise of the cotton pickers, the hollers to hurry. The fields are brown and crisp with dead cotton stalks, defoliated so the machines can get to the bolls. Cotton harvest is here.
Daddy doesn’t even stop for church during harvest time, but on Sunday night, I catch him in the dusky hall, between his supper and sleep. “Daddy?” I ask. “Will you tell me what happened to Constantine?”
He is so dog-tired, he sighs before he answers.
“How could Mother fire her, Daddy?”
“What? Darlin’, Constantine quit. You know your mother would never fire her.” He looks disappointed in me for asking such a thing.
“Do you know where she went? Or have her address?”
He shakes his head no. “Ask your mama, she’ll know.” He pats my shoulder. “People move on, Skeeter. But I wish she’d stayed down here with us.”
He wanders down the hall to bed. He is too honest a man to hide things so I know he doesn’t have any more facts about it than I do.
That week and every week, sometimes twice, I stop by Elizabeth’s to talk to Aibileen. Each time, Elizabeth looks a little warier. The longer I stay in the kitchen, the more chores Elizabeth comes up with until I leave: the doorknobs need polishing, the top of the refrigerator needs dusting, Mae Mobley’s fingernails could use a trim[59]. Aibileen is no more than cordial with me, nervous, stands at the kitchen sink and never stops working. It’s not long before I am ahead of copy and Mister Golden seems pleased with the column, the first two of which only took me about twenty minutes to write.
And every week, I ask Aibileen about Constantine. Can’t she get her address for me? Can’t she tell me anything about why she got fired? Was there a big to-do[60], because I just can’t imagine Constantine saying yes ma’am and walking out the back door. Mama’d get cross with her about a tarnished spoon and Constantine would serve her toast burned up for a week. I can only imagine how a firing would’ve gone.
It hardly matters, though, because all Aibileen will do is shrug at me, say she don’t know nothing.
One afternoon, after asking Aibileen how to get out tough tub rings (never having scrubbed a bathtub in my life), I come home. I walk past the relaxing room. The television set is on and I glance at it. Pascagoula’s standing about five inches away from the screen. I hear the words Ole Miss and on the fuzzy screen I see white men in dark suits crowding the camera, sweat running off their bald heads. I come closer and see a Negro man, about my age, standing in the middle of the white men, with Army men behind him. The picture pans back and there is my old administration building. Governor Ross Barnett stands with his arms crossed, looking the tall Negro in the eye. Next to the governor is our Senator Whitworth, whose son Hilly’s been trying to set me up with on a blind date.
I watch the television, riveted. Yet I am neither thrilled nor disappointed by the news that they might let a colored man into Ole Miss, just surprised. Pascagoula, though, is breathing so loud I can hear her. She stands stock-still, not aware I am behind her. Roger Sticker, our local reporter, is nervous, smiling, talking fast. “President Kennedy has ordered the governor to step aside[61] for James Meredith, I repeat, the President of the United —”
“Eugenia, Pascagoula! Turn that set off right this minute!”
Pascagoula jerks around to see me and Mother. She rushes out of the room, her eyes to the floor.
“Now, I won’t have it[62], Eugenia,” Mother whispers. “I won’t have you encouraging them like that.”
“Encouraging? It’s nationwide news, Mama.”
Mother sniffs. “It is not appropriate for the two of you to watch together,” and she flips the channel, stops on an afternoon rerun of Lawrence Welk.
“Look,