But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe. There’s a scene in The Help, the new movie based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel, that cracks open. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. 'You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?' 'Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.' Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. I don't think so,' I sobbed.Ĭonstantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. 'Now you look a here, Egenia'-because constantien was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face. 'Why you crying, girl?' Constantine asked me in the kitchen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's over to shoot guns in the field. “The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, 'Tell it again.”

Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. Just a different color', say that little colored girl.

'Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on. She got to reach up and do the same to me. 'Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.''I gives her little snout a tweak. You got hair, I got hair.''I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. 'But neither one a them little girls knew. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?' 'Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. 'one girl had black skin, one girl had white.' “Once upon a time they was two girls,' I say.

Stockett kathryn the help