The Help Is the Help
THE HELP IS THE HELP
Drinks and people should not be mixed…
—EVE LYNN KNOX GADDY UPON TAKING HER VODKA STRAIGHT UP
1967–1973
After that disturbing conversation with her eldest, Eve Lynn began watching her youngest more carefully, noting how Ella would run to Harlan after breakfast or after school, and the two of them would talk quietly for hours. She also clocked when his older cousin Darnell visited, and watched as Ella hung on his arm, and on his every word. While nothing seemed untoward on the surface, Eve Lynn had no idea what was bubbling underneath, and she didn’t want to wait to find out.
Such friendships had to be stopped, or at least discouraged, and she approached the subject with her husband cautiously, since he, like his youngest daughter, saw nothing wrong with fraternizing with the help. And he was especially sensitive when it came to Essie and James, who were, at least in Boo Gaddy’s eyes, beyond reproach. Essie and James had met as children on the estate and married there with Boo’s uncle, the local reverend, officiating. This was a needle Eve Lynn had to thread carefully.
“I’m concerned about Ella,” she said one evening when they were dressing for a formal dinner honoring the old mayor and his new wife. “She needs to make friends of her own, and venture out from the employees.”
“No harm in having friends here,” Boo said, more interested in his tie than the conversation.
“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Gaddy, but I don’t agree,” she said, walking over to straighten out the knot he had made both in his bow tie and in his lack of boundaries. “Where I come from the help is the help.” With a few deft moves, Eve Lynn perfected the bow, standing back to admire her masterpiece. “Now, don’t you look handsome,” she said, smiling at her husband’s reflection in the mirror. He smiled back, which she took as a sign to press on.
“I think I’ll have a talk with Essie, and suggest she speak to her boy,” she said, patting her husband’s lapel in punctuation of a decision he had neither made nor agreed to.
“A conversation with Essie about what?” he asked, instantly suspicious.
“About their boy,” she said, as if his name didn’t merit mention.
“Harlan?”
“Yes, Harlan,” she said, somewhat exasperated, “and that nephew of theirs who seems to be constantly visiting.”
“Darnell,” he said, reminding her that the young man had no other family, and that Essie and James were his de facto parents.
“I don’t care if they’re his parents, Mr. Gaddy,” she playfully scolded, “that boy’s in college.”
Boo looked at her a beat. “What exactly are you implying?” he asked, the tenor of the conversation suddenly shifting. He knew when Eve Lynn wanted something he might otherwise find objectionable she would often pour on the sugar to hide the bitter. He was well trained in her tactics.
“I’m not implying anything,” she said, “other than Ella Joy is spending far too much time with the both of them.” Boo, aware that his wife had strong beliefs when it came to class and race and white and wrong, didn’t want to insult Essie or James with untoward accusations.
“Well, I like the gaggle close to home,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “And I’m particularly fond of Harlan and Darnell. Let’s not make problems where they don’t exist.”
Picking up her pink beaded clutch, she headed toward the door, signaling an end to a conversation that had somehow gone belly-up. Boo’s meaning was clear, she was to refrain from mentioning anything to Essie or James.
The truth, which she didn’t share with her husband, or another soul, was not that Harlan or Darnell might take advantage of her daughter, but quite the inverse. “It’ll all come out in the wash,” Boo liked to say. For Eve Lynn, the question was, would the stain be permanent?
“I’m going to go to Howard University,” Ella announced at the dinner table six months later. It was the day before Christmas, and Ella, not yet twelve, had decided it was time to let her parents in on her future plans.
“ If you go to college, which remains to be seen,” Alice Lee replied, “you will not be going to Howard University!”
“Yes, I will,” Ella said with a stubborn finality that enraged her sister. “That’s where Darnell goes, that’s where Harlan will go, and that’s where I’m going.”
“You are an embarrassment,” Alice Lee declared.
“You are!” said Ella, defiantly holding her ground.
“Mother!” Alice Lee appealed to Eve Lynn, as she often did when conversations with her younger sister grew contentious. Both Boo and Knox knew well to steer clear when the sisters did battle.
Eve Lynn wiped the corners of her mouth, put down her serviette, and calmly addressed her youngest daughter. “No, dear, you will not be attending Howard University.” Ella looked over to Alice Lee who smiled, smugly.
“Why not?” she shouted, less outraged by the collusion between mother and sister than the verdict which gave no room for appeal.
“Ella Joy, you lower your voice right now,” Eve Lynn told her. Then, pointedly looking at Essie, who was clearing the plates, added, “We will discuss it another time.”
But Ella was mad, spitting mad, and got up from the table without asking to be excused. She ran to Essie and James’s cottage, where Darnell, who had just gotten into town, was wrapping Christmas gifts with Harlan for his aunt and uncle.
“It’s a school for colored people,” Darnell explained.
“ Only for colored people?” she asked.
He nodded.
“That makes zero sense,” she said. “It’s like having a school for people with blue eyes.”
Darnell didn’t say anything. How could he? From Ella’s point of view, she was being kept out, which she hated. And, beyond that, Alice Lee was right, which she despised.
Three months later, when Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, Ella mourned with Essie, James, Harlan, and Darnell. She even grew her curly hair into an Afro so she could stand in solidarity.
“I just don’t know what to do with her anymore,” Eve Lynn said, distancing herself from the young rebel and her new ’fro. Again, Boo didn’t seem distressed by his daughter’s activism or social awareness, but Eve Lynn urged him to look again with new eyes. After all, he was being groomed for political office by the Republican Party who, at least according to Eve Lynn, would look at the Gaddys, particularly the girls, through a microscope. “And what will they see?” she worried.
While Alice Lee was interested in the carefully curated world around her, with friends who cared as deeply about the coming debutante season as they did about literature, Ella was interested in the world-around-the-world-around-her, with a deep and growing passion for fighting for social injustice and civil rights.
But it wasn’t until 1970, when twelve-year-old Ella Joy Gaddy spoke on the record to the Courier Journal about desegregation and equal rights for women, that Boo Gaddy took notice. He had just been elected to state assembly and a local journalist had interviewed Ella and a few of her classmates about the world they would inherit.
“She’s not changing, is she, Boo?” Eve Lynn asked rhetorically, after reading and re-reading her daughter’s comments.
For once, Boo didn’t have an answer.
At the dawn of adolescence, Ella Joy Gaddy—first to laugh, first to smoke, first to take the dare—had turned into not only a firecracker and an activist, but a liability.
“All we are saying,” she told her confused parents when she was thirteen years old and had been suspended from school for ditching classes to do a sit-in, “is to give peace a chance.”
Six weeks later they enrolled Ella in a boarding school in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her opinions and appearances would be limited to visiting days.