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never think that Aibileen has such feelings or take those feelings into account. Just like the
mammy, Aibileen is only there to tend to the children and do the housework; she is not a person
outside of that context, and that belief is harmful asit aides in the erasure of these women as real
people with real problems and trauma.

Another maid, Yule Mae, is a perfect example of this erasure and the racial hierarchy
behind it. She decides to ask her employer, Ms. Hilly, and her husband for a loan of $75 so that
she and her husband might send their two sons off to college. Yule Mae presents Hilly and her
husband with a picture of her life, how smart and capable her sons are, but due to them seeing
Yule Mae as inferior because of her role as black domestic help, they do not seem to think her
family is worth the loan. Again, Yule Mae is cast in the shadow of the mammy, and seen as less
than because of it and the underlying racism that supported the system of Black domestic help in
the south. A system that says her only role should be to work and serve her employers, anything
else is not important. The mammy narrative in this instance sets Yule Mae up to be thrown in jail
after she tries to pawn a ring she found while cleaning. No one, aside from her fellow maids,
likely understood the desperation that led her to such a decision, and it isn't likely that her white
employers would understand either since the thought that she is a real person with real problems
doesn't enter their minds. To them she is just a thieving, negro maid that deserves to go to jail.

Yule Mae isn't the only maid punished because of the racial hierarchy in this film. Minny
Jackson loses her job with Ms. Hilly and her mother after she decides that she will not go outside
in a terrible rainstorm to use the bathroom for colored help. It is Minny's defiance of the clearly
drawn racial boundaries that leads to her being blacklisted and unable to find a new job. This
causes her husband to physically abuse her at home and we see the daily trauma that Minny is
having to live with because of the mammy narrative that has structured the social norms of