In Jackson, Mississippi, there are lines that are not crossed. Black maids raise the white children, but no one trusts them not to steal the silver. Aibileen is a black maid, raising her seventeenth white child, but with a bitter heart after the death of her son. Minny is the sassiest woman in Mississippi; she can cook like nobody's business, but she can't keep her lip buttoned. And Skeeter is a white woman with a degree but no ring on her finger. Home from college, Skeeter discovers her beloved maid Constantine has disappeared without a trace. And as different as they may be, these three women will come together for a clandestine project that will put all of them at risk.

But The Help is not just about race, it's about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other. It's about the dramas of domestic life: pride, competition on the cooking and home front complex emotions about the raising of young children, and that horrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them, deal with them and love them, even, better than you . . .

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AIBILEEN

chapter 1

August 1962

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.

But I ain’t never seen a baby yell like Mae Mobley Leefolt. First day I walk in the door, there she be, red- hot and hollering with the colic, fighting that bottle like it’s a rotten turnip. Miss Leefolt, she look terrified a her own child. “What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I stop it?”

It? That was my first hint: something is wrong with this situation. So I took that pink, screaming baby in my arms. Bounced her on my hip to get the gas moving and it didn’t take two minutes fore Baby Girl stopped her crying, got to smiling up at me like she do. But Miss Leefolt, she don’t pick up her own baby for the rest a the day. I seen plenty a womens get the baby blues after they done birthing. I reckon I thought that’s what it was. Here’s something about Miss Leefolt: she not just frowning all the time, she skinny. Her legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week. Twenty- three years old and she lanky as a fourteen- year- old boy. Even her hair is thin, brown, see- through. She try to tease it up, but it only make it look thinner. Her face be the same shape as that red devil on the redhot candy box, pointy chin and all. Fact, her whole body be so full a sharp knobs and corners, it’s no wonder she can’t soothe that baby. Babies like fat. Like to bury they face up in you armpit and go to sleep. They like big fat legs too. That I know.

By the time she a year old, Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go. Five o’clock would come round and she’d be hanging on my Dr. Scholl shoe, dragging over the floor, crying like I weren’t never coming back. Miss Leefolt, she’d narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that’s the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns.

Mae Mobley two years old now. She got big brown eyes and honey- color curls. But the bald spot in the back of her hair kind a throw things off. She get the same wrinkle between her eyebrows when she worried, like her mama. They kind a favor except Mae Mobley so fat. She ain’t gone be no beauty queen. I think it bother Miss Leefolt, but Mae Mobley my special baby.

I lost my own boy, Treelore, right before I started waiting on Miss Leefolt. He was twenty- four years old. The best part of a person’s life. It just wasn’t enough time living in this world.

He had him a little apartment over on Foley Street. Seeing a real nice girl name Frances and I spec they was gone get married, but he was slow bout things like that. Not cause he looking for something better, just cause he the thinking kind. Wore big glasses and reading all the time. He even start writing his own book, bout being a colored man living and working in Mississippi. Law, that made me proud. But one night he working late at the Scanlon- Taylor mill, lugging two- by- fours to the truck, splinters slicing all the way through the glove. He too small for that kind a work, too skinny, but he needed the job. He was tired. It was raining. He slip off the loading dock, fell down on the drive. Tractor trailer didn’t see him and crushed his lungs fore he could move. By the time I found out, he was dead.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air look black, sun look black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls a my house. Minny came ever day to make sure I was still breathing, feed me food to keep me living. Took three months fore I even look out the window, see if the world still there. I was surprise to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did. Five months after the funeral, I lifted myself up out a bed. I put on my white uniform and put my little gold cross back around my neck and I went to wait on Miss Leefolt cause she just have her baby girl. But it weren’t too long before I seen something in me had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore.

How did the book come about? When did you begin writing it?
I was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Even though half our town’s population was white and half was black, it was one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. Blacks and whites rarely shopped in the same stores, attended the same high schools or lived in the same neighborhoods. Despite this, one of the closest people to me was black- our maid, Demetrie. She cleaned, she cooked, and she took care of us, the white children.

Demetrie started working for my grandmother in 1955, and I loved Demetrie dearly. She wasn’t our mother, so it wasn’t her job to discipline us or make us sit up straight. There was a point in my childhood, after my parents divorced, when I didn’t feel like I was worth much. I remember Demetrie standing me in the mirror and telling me, “You are beautiful, you are important.” That is an incredible gift to give a child who doesn’t think much of herself.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how much she’d done for me. That’s when I started writing The Help.

Is the book, "The Help" autobiographical?
The Help is definitely fiction, but I was thinking about my own maid, Demetrie, when writing the voice of Aibileen.

Honestly, I have never been as brave as Skeeter. I wish I was more like her. She took a stand for what she believed in, ready to suffer the consequences. She stood up for inequality and suffered the ridicule of her friends, the risk of being arrested, and losing the one man who loved her.

It was a heck of a lot easier for me to write a book, fifty years after the trouble had died down, than it was for Skeeter.

Black women have traditionally raised white children in the heart of moneyed US - the southern states. What is it that makes white children bond better with black women?
I can’t say that white children bond better with black women, but children are color-blind. They have no preconceived ideas of race. I know I loved Demetrie because of who she was and the ways that she loved me and made me feel important. Color is not an issue until we are taught so.

The book travels back to the Sixties - did you see that turbulent decade in America? How did you recreate the era which comes across as so vivid in the book.

I was born in 1969. Although the racial violence had calmed down, not that much had changed in the homes of Mississippi.

As I did my research at the library in Mississippi, I realized that 1963 was a momentous year in Mississippi’s history—and the United States as a whole. The University of Mississippi accepted it’s first black student, James Meredith, that academic year. That summer, Medgar Evers—the field secretary for the NAACP-- was bludgeoned to death on his front steps in Jackson, Mississippi. In August, Martin Luther King marched on Washington with a quarter of a million people and at the end of the year, the president of the United States was assassinated.

But what was so fascinating to me, about 1963, was that throughout all this turmoil and the riots and the change, virtually nothing was changing in the kitchens of the white homes. White people went about their business, acting oblivious to what was happening right outside their doors.

The book has the makings of an American classic. What is it that you attribute the timelessness of it? It almost reminds one of Toni Morrison.

I think the message of The Help is universal, whether you live in the United States, India, Asia, anywhere. Despite our different colors, religions, backgrounds, we are all just people and not that much separates us, not nearly as much as people tend to think.

How do you rate her as a novelist and do you see shades of yourself in her?

Toni Morrison, my goodness. I would never even dare to compare myself to Toni Morrison. She is an icon, a genius. I can only admire her works and aspire to write as well as she has for the past forty years.

Are you working on any book? Please share?

I am writing my second novel. It also takes place in Mississippi, during the 1930’s and the Great Depression. It’s about a family of women who learn to get around the rules, rules created by men, in order to survive. It was a very difficult time in American History and women did not have nearly the opportunities that they have today.

How have your childhood and adult life been? When did you take to writing and the writers who influenced you?

I started writing when I was in about third grade, sold my first story to some sucker on the playground for 25 cents. I’m forty now, so it took me quite a long time to get published.

Writers that influenced me: I worship Eudora Welty, also from Mississippi. She recognized the intricacies and ironies between blacks and whites well before it became a hot topic.

Of course Harper Lee’s Too Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite. My dream is to write a book as perfectly nuanced as hers.

I think Kaye Gibbons, who wrote Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman and many others, is the greatest living American writer.