Twenty-three years old and she lanky as a fourteen-year-old boy. Her legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week. Here's something about Miss Leefolt: she not just frowning all the time, she skinny. I seen plenty a womens get the baby blues after they done birthing. But Miss Leefolt, she don't pick up her own baby for the rest a the day. 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. So I took that pink, screaming baby in my arms. It? That was my first hint: something is wrong with this situation. 'What am I doing wrong? Why can't I stop it?' Miss Leefolt, she look terrified a her own child. 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. 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.īut I ain't never seen a baby yell like Mae Mobley Leefolt. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. Taking care a white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning.

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. Your white uniform as a black domestic was your ticket anywhere in town.'īut Stockett has been criticized for trying to cast how a black maid might feel in a white household - and she says the criticism makes her cringe.

'I don't know, but I think about that a lot. 'I always wonder, like, when would she had taken off her white uniform and had the guts to walk into the white grocery store just as a consumer?' she says. Stockett says she thinks about Demetrie all the time. What conflicting ideas that we love and embrace these women, and entrust them to raise our children and to feed us and to bathe us, but we keep something as silly as a bathroom separate.'

'But the tricky part is, like so many families in the South, we also expected her to use a separate bathroom, to use separate utensils. When Demetrie got sick, we knew it was our responsibility to take care of her and pay her medical bills.

What conflicting ideas that we love and embrace these women, and entrust them to raise our children and to feed us and to bathe us, but we keep something as silly as a bathroom separate.

Kathryn stockett the help 2009