How It All Goes Down
- Aibileen narrates this chapter.
- Last week, Skeeter asked Minny if she and her husband Leroy talk about civil rights.
- Aibileen reveals (to the readers) that Leroy beats Minny. Minny told Skeeter not to ask about Leroy, but Skeeter pushed the point.
- Minny started to walk out, but Aibileen showed her Hilly's outside-bathroom plan. Minny recommits.
- Aibileen, Elizabeth, and Hilly are in Elizabeth's yard watching the kids play in a plastic pool. For all of Hilly's faults, Aibileen is impressed with the loving relationship she has with her children.
- Aibileen gets scared when she hears Hilly say, "if Skeeter thinks she's going to get away with this colored non—" (14.46), but Hilly's daughter Heather interrupts. She hears Hilly saying she read something in Skeeter's satchel.
- Aibileen has observed that white women don't resort to physical violence when they want to hurt you. Instead, they arrange it so your car is repossessed, you get evicted from your house, your family and friends get fired, and on and on until you are ruined.
- The next night, Skeeter calls Aibileen at home. She tells Aibileen about the satchel incident. They decide to continue the project anyway. If Hilly does know about anything more than the Jim Crow pamphlet, stopping won't change anything.
- Aibileen works late. The bus stops at a roadblock. Someone has been shot and all the black people have to get off the bus. She walks to Minny's and learns that civil rights leader Medgar Evers has been shot and killed by the KKK. He lived five minutes from Minny's house by car.
- His assassination turns Jackson into a city boiling with racial tension. Aibileen observes,
- "For the second time in two months, Jackson Mississippi's in Life magazine. This time though, we make the cover" (14.177).