On our fifth session

On our fifth session, Aibileen reads to me about the day Treelore died. She reads about how his broken body was thrown on the back of a pickup by the white foreman. “And then they dropped him off at the colored hospital. That’s what the nurse told me, who was standing outside. They rolled him off the truck bed and the white men drove away.” Aibileen doesn’t cry,homepage, just lets a parcel of time pass while I stare at the typewriter, she at the worn black tiles.
On the sixth session, Aibileen says, “I went to work for Miss Leefolt in 1960. When Mae Mobley two weeks old,” and I feel I’ve passed through a leaden gate of confidence. She describes the building of the garage bathroom, admits she is glad it is there now. It’s easier than listening to Hilly complain about sharing a toilet with the maid. She tells me that I once commented that colored people attend too much church. That stuck with her. I cringe, wondering what else I’ve said, never suspecting the help was listening or cared.
One night she says, “I was thinking . . .” But then she stops.
I look up from the typewriter, wait. It took Aibileen vomiting on herself for me to learn to let her take her time.
“I’s thinking I ought to do some reading. Might help me with my own writing.”
“Go down to the State Street Library. They have a whole room full of Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty—”
Aibileen gives me a dry cough. “You know colored folks ain’t allowed in that library.”
I sit there a second, feeling stupid. “I can’t believe I forgot that,nike shox torch ii.” The colored library must be pretty bad. There was a sit-in at the white library a few years ago and it made the papers. When the colored crowd showed up for the sit-in trial, the police department simply stepped back and turned the German shepherds loose. I look at Aibileen and am reminded, once again, the risk she’s taking talking to me. “I’ll be glad to pick the books up for you,” I say.
Aibileen hurries to the bedroom and comes back with a list. “I better mark the ones I want first. I been on the waiting list for To Kill a Mockingbird at the Carver Library near bout three months now. Less see . . .”
I watch as she puts checkmarks next to the books: The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, poems by Emily Dickinson (any), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
“I read some a that back in school, but I didn’t get to finish.” She keeps marking, stopping to think which one she wants next.
“You want a book by . . . Sigmund Freud?”
“Oh, people crazy.” She nods. “I love reading about how the head work. You ever dream you fall in a lake? He say you dreaming about your own self being born. Miss Frances, who I work for in 1957, she had all them books.”
On her twelfth title, I have to know. “Aibileen, how long have you been wanting to ask me this? If I’d check these books out for you?”
“A while.” She shrugs. “I guess I’s afraid to mention it.”
“Did you ,replica gucci wallets. . . think I’d say no?”
“These is white rules. I don’t know which ones you following and which ones you ain’t,link.”
We look at each other a second. “I’m tired of the rules,” I say.