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real cold fear. Ain’t no game crossing Miss Hilly. “I ain’t never gone get no work again, Leroy gone kill me…”
    Kindra gets to crying in the background. Minny hang up without even saying goodbye. I don’t know what she talking about a pie. But Law, knowing Minny, it could not have been good.
     
    T HAT NIGHT, I pick me a poke salad and a tomato out a Ida’s garden. I fry up some ham, make a little gravy for my biscuit. My wig been brushed out and put up, got my pink rollers in, already sprayed the Good Nuff on my hair. I been worried all afternoon, thinking bout Minny. I got to put it out a my mind if I’m on get some sleep tonight.
    I set at my table to eat, turn on the kitchen radio. Little Stevie Wonder’s singing “Fingertips.” Being colored ain’t nothing on that boy. He twelve years old, blind, and got a hit on the radio. When he done, I skip over Pastor Green playing his sermon and stop on WBLA. They play the juke joint blues.
    I like them smoky, liquor-drinking sounds when it get dark. Makes me feel like my whole house is full a people. I can almost see em, swaying here in my kitchen, dancing to the blues. When I turn off the ceiling light, I pretend we at The Raven. They’s little tables with red-covered lights. It’s May or June and warm. My man Clyde flash me his white-toothed smile and say Honey, you want you a drink? And I say, Black Mary straight up and then I get to laughing at myself, setting in my kitchen having this daydream, cause the raciest thing I ever take is the purple Nehi.
    Memphis Minny get to singing on the radio how lean meat won’t fry, which is about how the love don’t last. Time to time, I think I might find myself another man, one from my church. Problem is, much as I love the Lord, churchgoing man never do all that much for me. Kind a man I like ain’t the kind that stays around when he done spending all you money. I made that mistake twenty years ago. When my husband Clyde left me for that no-count hussy up on Farish Street, one they call Cocoa, I figured I better shut the door for good on that kind a business.
    A cat get to screeching outside and bring me back to my cold kitchen. I turn the radio off and the light back on, fish my prayer book out my purse. My prayer book is just a blue notepad I pick up at the Ben Franklin store. I use a pencil so I can erase till I get it right. I been writing my prayers since I was in junior high. When I tell my seventh-grade teacher I ain’t coming back to school cause I got to help out my mama, Miss Ross just about cried.
    “You’re the smartest one in the class, Aibileen,” she say. “And the only way you’re going to keep sharp is to read and write every day.”
    So I started writing my prayers down instead a saying em. But nobody’s called me smart since.
    I turn the pages a my prayer book to see who I got tonight. A few times this week, I thought about maybe putting Miss Skeeter on my list. I’m not real sure why. She always nice when she come over. It makes me nervous, but I can’t help but wonder what she was gone ask me in Miss Leefolt’s kitchen, about do I want to change things. Not to mention her asking me the whereabouts a Constantine, her maid growing up. I know what happen between Constantine and Miss Skeeter’s mama and ain’t no way I’m on tell her that story.
    The thing is though, if I start praying for Miss Skeeter, I know that conversation gone continue the next time I see her. And the next and the next. Cause that’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going. And the bathroom situation, it just ain’t something I really want to discuss.
    I scan down my prayer list. My Mae Mobley got the number one rung, then they’s Fanny Lou at church, ailing from the rheumatism. My sisters Inez and Mable in Port Gibson that got eighteen kids between em and six with the flu. When the list be thin, I slip in that old stinky white fella that live behind the feed store, the one lost his