I try to feed her a few more sips of Co-Cola but she won’t take it. She can’t hardly lift her hand to wave it away.

“I’m going to . . . be sick. I’m—”

I grab the garbage can, watch as Miss Celia vomits over it. And then I feel something wet on me and I look down and the blood’s coming so fast now, it’s leaked over to where I’m sitting. Everytime she heaves, the blood pushes out of her. I know she losing more than a person can handle.

“Sit up, Miss Celia! Get a good breath, now,” I say, but she’s slumping against me.

“Nuh-uh, you don’t want a lay down. Come on.” I push her back up but she’s gone limp and I feel tears spring up in my eyes because that damn doctor should be here by now. He should’ve sent an ambulance and in the twenty-five years I’ve been cleaning houses nobody ever tells you what to do when your white lady keels over dead on top of you.

“Come on, Miss Celia!” I scream, but she’s a soft white lump next to me, and there is nothing I can do but sit and tremble and wait.

Many minutes pass before the back bell rings. I prop Miss Celia’s head on a towel, take off my shoes so I don’t track the blood over the house, and run for the door.

“She done passed out!” I tell the doctor, and the nurse pushes past me and heads to the back like she knows her way around. She pulls the smelling salts out and puts them under Miss Celia’s nose and Miss Celia jerks her head, lets out a little cry, and opens her eyes.

The nurse helps me get Miss Celia out of her bloody nightgown. She’s got her eyes open but can hardly stand up. I put old towels down in the bed and we lay her down. I go in the kitchen where Doctor Tate’s washing his hands.

“She in the bedroom,” I say.Not the kitchen, you snake. He’s in his fifties, Doctor Tate, and tops me by a good foot and a half. He has real white skin and this long, narrow face that shows no feelings at all. Finally he goes back to the bedroom.

Just before he opens the door, I touch him on the arm.“She don’t want her husband to know. He ain’t gone find out, is he?”

He looks at me like I’m a nigger and says, “You don’t think it’s his business?” He walks into the bedroom and shuts the door in my face.

I go to the kitchen and pace the floor. Half an hour passes, then an hour, and I’m worrying so hard that Mister Johnny’s going to come home and find out, worrying Doctor Tate will call him, worrying they’re going to leave that baby in the bowl for me to deal with, my head’s throbbing. Finally, I hear Doctor Tate open the door.

“She alright?”

“She’s hysterical. I gave her a pill to calm her down.”

The nurse walks around us and out the back door carrying a white tin box. I breathe out for what feels like the first time in hours.

“You watch her tomorrow,” he says and hands me a white paper bag. “Give her another pill if she gets too agitated. There’ll be more bleeding. But don’t call me up unless it’s heavy.”

“You ain’t really gone tell Mister Johnny bout this, are you, Doctor Tate?”

He lets out a sick hiss.“You make sure she doesn’t miss her appointment on Friday. I’m not driving all the way out here just because she’s too lazy to come in.”

He waltzes out and slams the door behind him.

The kitchen clock reads five o’clock. Mister Johnny’s going to be home in half an hour. I grab the Clorox and the rags and a bucket.

MISS SKEETER

Chapter 19

IT IS 1963. The Space Age they’re calling it. A man has circled the earth in a rocketship. They’ve invented a pill so married women don’t have to get pregnant. A can of beer opens with a single finger instead of a can opener. Yet my parents’ house is still as hot as it was in 1899, the year Great-grandfather built it.

“Mama, please,” I beg, “when are we going to get air-conditioning?”

“We have survived this long without electric cool and I have no intentions of setting one of those tacky contraptions in my window.”

And so, as July wanes on, I am forced from my attic bedroom to a cot on the screened back porch. When we were kids, Constantine used to sleep out here with Carlton and me in the summer, when Mama and Daddy went to out-of-town weddings. Constantine slept in an old-fashioned white nightgown up to her chin and down to her toes even though it’d be hot as Hades. She used to sing to us so we’d go to sleep. Her voice was so beautiful I couldn’t understand how she’d never had lessons. Mother had always told me a person can’t learn anything without proper lessons. It’s just unreal to me that she was here, right here on this porch, and now she’s not. And no one will tell me a thing. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

Next to my cot, now, my typewriter sits on a rusted, white enamel washtable. Underneath is my red satchel. I take Daddy’s hankie and wipe my forehead, press salted ice to my wrists. Even on the back porch, the Avery Lumber Company temperature dial rises from 89 to 96 to a nice round 100 degrees. Luckily, Stuart doesn’t come over during the day, when the heat is at its worst.

I stare at my typewriter with nothing to do, nothing to write. Minny’s stories are finished and typed already. It’s a wretched feeling. Two weeks ago, Aibileen told me that Yule May, Hilly’s maid, might help us, that she shows a little more interest every time Aibileen talks to her. But with Medgar Evers’s murder and colored people getting arrested and beatby the police, I’m sure she’s scared to death by now.

Maybe I ought to go over to Hilly’s and ask Yule May myself. But no, Aibileen’s right, I’d probably scare her even more and ruin any chance we have.

Under the house, the dogs yawn, whine in the heat. One lets out a half-hearted woof as Daddy’s field workers, five Negroes, pull up in a truckbed. The men jump from the tailgate, hoofing up dust when they hit the dirt. They stand a moment, dead-faced, stupefied. The foreman drags a red cloth across his black forehead, his lips, his neck. It is so recklessly hot, I don’t know how they can stand baking out there in the sun.

In a rare breeze, my copy ofLife magazine flutters. Audrey Hepburn smiles on the cover, no sweat beading on her upper lip. I pick it up and finger the wrinkled pages, flip to the story on the Soviet Space Girl. I already know what’s on the next page. Behind her face is a picture of Carl Roberts, a colored schoolteacher from Pelahatchie, forty miles from here. “In April, Carl Roberts told Washington reporters what it means to be a black man in Mississippi, calling the governor ‘a pathetic man with the morals of a streetwalker.’ Roberts was found cattle-branded and hung from a pecan tree.”

They’d killed Carl Roberts for speaking out, fortalking. I think about how easy I thought it would be, three months ago, to get a dozen maids to talk to me. Like they’d just been waiting, all this time, to spill their stories to a white woman. How stupid I’d been.

When I can’t take the heat another second, I go sit in the only cool place on Longleaf. I turn on the ignition and roll up the windows, pull my dress up around my underwear and let the bi-level blow on me full blast. As I lean my head back, the world drifts away, tinged by the smell of Freon and Cadillac leather. I hear a truck pull up into the front drive but I don’t open my eyes. A second later, my passenger door opens.

“Damn it feels good in here.”