In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. Black maids raise the white children, but no one trusts them not to steal the silver. Black maids clean the toilets, but they have their own at the back of the house. There are lines, and no one crosses them.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home from college: she may have a degree, but her mother won't be happy until Skeeter has a ring on her finger. She would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared.

Aibileen is a black maid, a smart woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her since the death of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. Aibileen's best friend is Minny, short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue.

Seemingly as different as can be, these women will come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? For what?

The Help is about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other. It's about the emotions of domestic life: pride, competition on the cooking and home front, and the horrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them and deal with them - love them, even - better than you ...

With pitch-perfect writing, Kathryn Stockett introduces us to three extraordinary women. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humour and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

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'It weaves together the beginnings of black rights but also of women's rights. We learn that one of the characters, Skeeter, is as trapped by the expectations of her parents and friends as are the black women she writes about. It also shows how, despite the lack of equality distorting the realtionships between the women, there was room for genuine friendship and affection, as well as incredible callousness.'
Cherie Blair

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.