It was 1947, and my father was in the Navy.
He'd been transferred to Algiers Naval Base in New Orleans, and since they weren't living on base, my parents had to find their own place. They ended up renting a floor of a house on North Rampart Street — right on the border of the French Quarter. Their neighbors shared a courtyard with them, and the house across the way was a bordello. There are stories there, but those are for another time.
My dad was gone most of the year. Winters, he was out in the Gulf of Mexico, mapping the ocean floor for naval navigation charts. Summers, he'd be up off Nova Scotia doing the same thing. He was gone far more than he was ever home. So here was my mother — a young woman in a brand-new city with no family, no friends, nobody. She had my older sister, who was six going on seven, and she was pregnant with me.
She was going to need help.
My dad wasn't even in the state when I was born. He was somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia.
So my mother hired Leona.
I don't know exactly how old Leona was, but from how my mother described her, she was really old. Old enough that she could have been born into slavery — and if she wasn't, her parents certainly were. She lived in the Desire Housing Project, and she rode the streetcar to get to our house — the actual streetcar named Desire — and it ran right past our front door.
My mother was lonely. More than anything, she wanted to sit down and talk to this woman. Can you imagine? My mother had probably never met a Black person in her entire life before she got to New Orleans, and now here was someone who had lived through a history my mother could barely fathom. Someone from that culture, from that era, with stories that stretched back to the very edge of slavery. My mother wanted to hear every one of them.
At meal time, my mother would ask Leona to sit with her at the table. And Leona wouldn't do it.
"It's not right," she'd say. "It's not allowed."
"What do you mean it's not allowed?" my mother would say. "Of course — I would love for you to sit with me. We can visit."
But Leona would not bend that rule. It wasn't my mother's rule. It was the rule. If you've seen The Help or read the book, you know — that was just how it was. Leona was supposed to be separate, and she held that line no matter how much my mother pushed against it.
If you knew my mother, you'd know that telling her not to do something was the surest way to guarantee she'd do it.
As my mother got further along in her pregnancy, there came a day when Leona yelled from the kitchen: Don't come in here.
So of course my mother went straight in.
Leona had a varicose vein that had burst. She was old, and the bleeding was bad — her leg was a mess. But Leona wasn't upset about the blood. She was upset that my mother had seen it. Leona was deeply superstitious, rooted in her culture and her beliefs, and she was convinced that if a pregnant woman saw blood, it would leave a mark on the baby.
My mother tried to tell her — no, no, that's not going to happen — but there was no time for arguments. She had to get Leona to the hospital.
This wasn't like today. You didn't just pick up the phone and call 911. My mother didn't have a car — she lived in the city, didn't need one. So she called a cab company.
And here's where 1947 showed its teeth.
A Black cab couldn't come into a white neighborhood. And a white cab couldn't transport a Black person.
My mother was frantic. She's got this woman bleeding in her kitchen, and the cab company is telling her no. Finally, the person on the phone said, "Well — if you were to go with her, and she's your employee, we could do that."
"Of course I'm going with her," my mother said. "I'm not going to send her by herself."
She got Leona to the hospital. They took care of her. Everything turned out alright.
Then I was born.
On the back of my right hand, I had a huge red birthmark. It looked like I'd been burned. Over the years it faded — by the time I was grown it had gone completely white — but as a baby and a small child, it was bright and impossible to miss.
Leona loved to hold me. She'd ask for me, and my mother would hand me over, and Leona would sit there cradling me — and then she'd look down at my hand and cry.
She believed she had marked me.
Nothing my mother said could convince her otherwise. The blood, the pregnant woman walking in, the baby born with a bright red hand — in Leona's mind, it was all connected. She carried that guilt like it was hers to carry.
Despite it all — or maybe because of it — Leona became deeply attached to our family. Not just to me, but to my sister, to my mother, to all of us. She was more than an employee. She was part of our life in that strange, beautiful, complicated city.
Then my father got his orders. He was being transferred to New York.
Leona wanted to go. She wanted to move with my family — to leave New Orleans and everything she knew and follow them north.
My mother would have loved nothing more than to take her. But she had to be practical. When you're a Navy family being transferred, you have no idea what kind of housing you're going to get, how much room there'll be, what the situation looks like on the other end. And beyond the logistics — Leona had lived in New Orleans her entire life. Her home, her people, everything she'd ever known was there.
My mother had to say no.
She didn't want to. But she had to.
And that is the story of The Help.