The Help

“I got me a knife!” I holler. I take some more steps and he does too. When I get seven or eight feet from him, I’m panting. We both stare.

“Why, you’re a fat nigger,” he calls in a strange, high voice and gives himself a long stroke.

I take a deep breath. And then I rush forward and swing with the broom. Whoosh! I’ve missed him by inches and he dances away. I lunge again and the man runs toward the house. He heads straight for the back door, where Miss Celia’s face is in the window.

“Nigger can’t catch me! Nigger too fat to run!”

He makes it to the steps and I panic that he’s going to try and bust down the door, but then he flips around and runs along the sideyard, holding that gigantic flopping po’boy in his hand.

“You get out a here!” I scream after him, feeling a sharp pain, knowing my cut’s ripping wider.

I rush him hard from the bushes to the pool, heaving and panting. He slows at the edge of the water and I get close and land a good swing on his rear, thwak! The stick snaps and the brush-end flies off.

“Didn’t hurt!” He jiggles his hand between his legs, hitching up his knees. “Have a little pecker pie, nigger? Come on, get you some pecker pie!”

I dive around him back to the middle of the yard, but the man is too tall and too fast and I’m getting slower. My swings are flying wild and soon I’m hardly even jogging. I stop, lean over, breathing hard, the short broken-off broom in my hand. I look down and the knife—it is gone.

As soon as I look back up, whaaam! I stagger. The ringing comes harsh and loud, making me totter. I cover my ear but the ringing gets louder. He’s punched me on the same side as the cut.

He comes closer and I close my eyes, knowing what’s about to happen to me, knowing I’ve got to move away but I can’t. Where is the knife? Does he have the knife? The ringing’s like a nightmare.

“You get out a here before I kill you,” I hear, like it’s in a tin can. My hearing’s half gone and I open my eyes. There’s Miss Celia in her pink satin nightgown. She’s got a fire poker in her hand, heavy, sharp.

“White lady want a taste a pecker pie, too?” He flops his penis around at her and she steps closer to the man, slow, like a cat. I take a deep breath while the man jumps left, then right, laughing and chomping his toothless gums. But Miss Celia just stands still.

After a few seconds he frowns, looks disappointed that Miss Celia isn’t doing anything. She’s not swinging or frowning or hollering. He looks over at me. “What about you? Nigger too tired to—”

Crack!

The man’s jaw goes sideways and blood bursts out of his mouth. He wobbles around, turns, and Miss Celia whacks the other side of his face too. Like she just wanted to even him up.

The man stumbles forward, looking nowhere in particular. Then he falls face flat.

“Lordy, you . . . you got him . . .” I say, but in the back of my head, there’s this voice asking me, real calm, like we’re just having tea out here, Is this really happening? Is a white woman really beating up a white man to save me? Or did he shake my brain pan loose and I’m over there dead on the ground...

I try to focus my eyes. Miss Celia, she’s got a snarl on her lips. She raises her rod and ka-wham! across the back of his knees.

This ain’t happening, I decide. This is just too damn strange.

Ka-wham! She hits him across his shoulders, making a ugh sound every time.

“I—I said you got him now, Miss Celia,” I say. But evidently, Miss Celia doesn’t think so. Even with my ears ringing, it sounds like chicken bones cracking. I stand up straighter, make myself focus my eyes before this turns into a homicide. “He down, he down, Miss Celia,” I say. “Fact, he”—I struggle to catch the poker—“he might be dead.”

I finally catch it and she lets go and the poker flies into the yard. Miss Celia steps back from him, spits in the grass. Blood’s spattered across her pink satin nightgown. The fabric’s stuck to her legs.

“He ain’t dead,” Miss Celia says.

“He close,” I say.

“Did he hit you hard, Minny?” she asks, but she’s staring down at him. “Did he hurt you bad?”

I can feel blood running down my temple but I know it’s from the sugar bowl cut that’s split open again. “Not as bad as you hurt him,” I say.

The man groans and we both jump back. I grab the poker and the broom handle from the grass. I don’t give her either one.

He rolls halfway over. His face is bloody on both sides, his eyes are swelling shut. His jaw’s been knocked off its hinge and somehow he still brings himself to his feet. And then he starts to walk away, a pathetic wobbly thing. He doesn’t even look back at us. We just stand there and watch him hobble through the prickly boxwood bushes and disappear in the trees.

“He ain’t gone get far,” I say, and I keep my grip on that poker. “You whooped him pretty good.”

“You think?” she says.

I give her a look. “Like Joe Louis with a tire iron.”