The Help / Прислуга. Книга для чтения на английском языке

I had to accept that Constantine, my one true ally, had left me to fend for myself with these people.

Chapter 6

On a hot september morning, I wake up in my childhood bed, slip on the huarache shoes my brother, Carlton, brought me back from Mexico. A man’s pair since, evidently, Mexican girls’ feet don’t grow to size nine-and-a-half. Mother hates them and says they’re trashy-looking.

Over my nightgown, I put on one of Daddy’s old button-down shirts and slip out the front door. Mother is on the back porch with Pascagoula and Jameso while they shuck oysters.

“You cannot leave a Negro and a Nigra together unchaperoned,” Mother’d whispered to me, a long time ago. “It’s not their fault, they just can’t help it.”

I head down the steps to see if my mail-order copy of Catcher in the Rye[51 - Catcher in the Rye – «Над пропастью во ржи», роман Дж. Сэлинджера о проблемах взросления] is in the box. I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.

By the time I reach the end of the drive, my huaraches and ankles are covered with fine yellow dust.

On either side of me, the cotton fields are a glaring green, fat with bolls. Daddy lost the back fields to the rain last month, but the majority bloomed unharmed. The leaves are just starting to spot brown with defoliant and I can still smell the sour chemical in the air.

There are no cars on the County Road. I open the mailbox.

And there, underneath Mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal, is a letter addressed to Miss Eugenia Phelan. The red raised font in the corner says Harper & Row, Publishers. I tear it open right there in the lane, in nothing but my long nightgown and Daddy’s old Brooks Brothers shirt.

September 4, 1962

Dear Miss Phelan,

I am responding personally to your rГ©sumГ© because I found it admirable that a young lady with absolutely no work experience would apply for an editing job at a publisher as prestigious as ours.

A minimum of five years in the business is mandatory for such a job. You’d know this if you’d done any amount of research on the business.

Having once been an ambitious young lady myself, however, I’ve decided to offer you some advice: go to your local newspaper and get an entry-level job. You included in your letter that you “immensely enjoy writing.