How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Mae Mobley make an ugly face at me and then she rear back and bowp. She wack me right on the ear. (2.81)
After Elizabeth hits Mae Mobley, Mae Mobley hits Aibileen, whom she loves. Aibileen helps break this cycle of violence by responding to Mae Mobley's aggression with love and empathy. By the end of the book, Mae Mobley loves Aibileen so much she'd never dream of hurting her.
Quote #2
"I ain't telling, I ain't telling nobody about that pie. But I give her what she deserve! […] I ain't never gone get no work again, Leroy gone kill me… (2.119)
This line contains one of the first hints that Minny's husband Leroy beats her.
Quote #3
"Use the white bathroom at Pinchman Lawn and Garden. Say they wasn't no sign up saying so. Two white men chase him and beat him. […] He up at the hospital. I heard he blind" (7.126, 7.128)
Odd as it sounds, bathrooms and violence are intimately connected in The Help. You can read more about this in "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory."
Quote #4
And my cousin Shinelle in Cauter County? They burn up her car cause she went down to the voting station. (7.156)
Black men have had the legal right to vote since the 1870s and black women since the 1920s. In the 1960s, when the novel takes place, violence is used to stop black voters from exercising this right.
Quote #5
No, white womans like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with them. (14.63)
Aibileen and some of the other women in the novel express the sentiment that a white woman's way of getting even is as bad or worse as a white man's.
Quote #6
She don't know about them sharp, shiny utensils a white lady use. About that knock on the door, late at night. That there are white men out there hungry to hear about a colored person crossing whites, ready with wooden bats, matchsticks. Any little thing'll do. (14.113)
Here, Aibileen is worried that Skeeter doesn't know how much danger she's in or how much danger she might be putting Aibileen and her friends in, after she decorates Hilly's yard with used toilets.
Quote #7
"But what would they do? Hitch us to a pickup and drag us behind? Shoot me in my yard? Or just starve us to death?" (14.167)
After civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated minutes from Minny's house, Minny's only worries more about what will happen if their storytelling project is discovered.
Quote #8
"It makes me sick to hear about that kind of brutality." Daddy sets his fork down silently. […] "I'm ashamed sometimes, Senator, ashamed of what goes on in Mississippi." (20.79)
Skeeter, apparently, has never heard her father voice his political opinions before, and is proud of what she hears.
Quote #9
I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she'll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town. (22.58)
Hilly doesn't catch the irony. She collects money for The Poor Starving Children of Africa as proof she isn't a racist. In all, she seems to do more harm than good, even in her so-called charity work.
Quote #10
"If I didn't hit you, Minny, who knows what you'd become." (32.30)
Who knows what I could become if Leroy would stop goddamn hitting me. (32.32)
Minny comes to realize that she can only grow and reach all she's capable of if she escapes the constant physical abuse she suffers at the hands of her husband.