The Help

And God, how I loved to talk to Demetrie. After school, I’d sit in my grandmother’s kitchen with her, listening to her stories and watching her mix up cakes and fry chicken. Her cooking was outstanding. It was something people discussed at length after they ate at my grandmother’s table. You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie’s caramel cake.

But my older brother and sister and I weren’t allowed to bother Demetrie during her own lunch break. Grandmother would say, “Leave her alone now, let her eat, this is her time,” and I would stand in the kitchen doorway, itching to get back with her. Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest so she could finish her work, not to mention, white people didn’t sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now.

I didn’t pity Demetrie, though. There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house, cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own, and we felt like we were filling a void in her life. If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us: my sister, Susan, my brother, Rob, and me.

My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than the other kids were. Nobody got cross with me if Demetrie was nearby. She would stand me in front of the mirror and say, “You are beautiful. You a beautiful girl,” when clearly I was not. I wore glasses and had stringy brown hair. I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub. My mother was out of town a lot. Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around, and I felt left over. Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.

MY PARENTS DIVORCED when I was six. Demetrie became even more important to me then. When my mother went on one of her frequent trips, Daddy put us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us. I’d cry and cry on Demetrie’s shoulder, missing my mother so bad I’d get a fever from it.

By then, my sister and brother had, in a way, outgrown Demetrie. They’d sit around the motel penthouse playing poker, using bar straws as money, with the front desk staff.

I remember watching them, jealous because they were older, and thinking one time, I am not a baby anymore. I don’t have to take up with Demetrie while the others play poker.

So I got in the game and of course lost all my straws in about five minutes. And back I went onto Demetrie’s lap, acting put out, watching the others play. Yet after only a minute, my forehead was against her soft neck and she was rocking me like we were two people in a boat.

“This where you belong. Here with me,” she said, and patted my hot leg. Her hands were always cool. I watched the older kids play cards, not caring as much that Mother was away again. I was where I belonged.

THE RASH OF negative accounts about Mississippi, in the movies, in the papers, on television, have made us natives a wary, defensive bunch. We are full of pride and shame, but mostly pride.

Still, I got out of there. I moved to New York City when I was twenty-four. I learned that the first question anyone asked anybody, in a town so transient, was “Where are you from?” And I’d say, “Mississippi.” And then I’d wait.

To people who smiled and said, “I’ve heard it’s beautiful down there,” I’d say, “My hometown is number three in the nation for gang-related murders.” To people who said, “God, you must be glad to be out of that place,” I’d bristle and say, “What do you know? It’s beautiful down there.”

Once, at a roof party, a drunk man from a rich white Metro North- train type of town asked me where I was from and I told him Mississippi. He sneered and said, “I am so sorry.”

I nailed down his foot with the stiletto portion of my shoe and spent the next ten minutes quietly educating him on the where-from-abouts of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Jim Henson, Faith Hill, James Earl Jones, and Craig Claiborne, the food editor and critic for The New York Times. I informed him that Mississippi hosted the first lung transplant and the first heart transplant and that the basis of the United States legal system was developed at the University of Mississippi.

I was homesick and I’d been waiting for somebody like him.

I wasn’t very genteel or ladylike, and the poor guy squirmed away and looked nervous for the rest of the party. But I couldn’t help it.

Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.