The Help / Прислуга. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Chapter 2

You’d never know it living here, but Jackson, Mississippi, be filled with two hundred thousand peoples. I see them numbers in the paper and I got to wonder, where do them peoples live? Underground? Cause I know just about ever-body on my side a the bridge and plenty a white families too, and that sure don’t add up to be no two hundred thousand.

Six days a week, I take the bus across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to where Miss Leefolt and all her white friends live, in a neighborhood call Belhaven.

Right next to Belhaven be the downtown and the state capital. Capitol building is real big, pretty on the outside but I never been in it. I wonder what they pay to clean that place.

Down the road from Belhaven is white Woodland Hills, then Sherwood Forest, which is miles a big live oaks with the moss hanging down. Nobody living in it yet, but it’s there for when the white folks is ready to move somewhere else new. Then it’s the country, out where Miss Skeeter live on the Long-leaf cotton plantation.

She don’t know it, but I picked cotton out there in 1931, during the Depression[10 - Depression – Великая депрессия, экономический кризис 1929 и 1930-х гг.], when we didn’t have nothing to eat but state cheese.

So Jackson’s just one white neighborhood after the next and more springing up down the road. But the colored part a town, we one big anthill, surrounded by state land that ain’t for sale. As our numbers get bigger, we can’t spread out.

Our part a town just gets thicker.

I get on the number six bus that afternoon, which goes from Belhaven to Farish Street. The bus today is nothing but maids heading home in our white uniforms. We all chatting and smiling at each other like we own it – not cause we mind if they’s white people on here, we sit anywhere we want to now thanks to Miss Parks[11 - Miss Parks – Роза Паркс (1913–2005), афроамериканка, в 1955 году отказалась уступить место в автобусе белому пассажиру; в то время в штате Алабама это считалось нарушением закона, она была арестована, что подняло волну возмущения, ее имя известно всей стране] – just cause it’s a friendly feeling.

I spot Minny in the back center seat. Minny short and big, got shiny black curls.