Sue Monk Kidd - The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd

The Secret Life of Bees

2002

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her fathers account of the event. Now fourteen, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lilys harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world, as about the mystery surrounding her mother.

The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.

Man and Insects

A t night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees ueezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam. During the day I heard them tunneling through the walls of my bedroom, sounding like a radio tuned to static in the next room, and I imagined them in there turning the walls into honeycombs, with honey seeping out for me to taste. The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed. I know it is presumptuous to compare my small life to hers, but I have reason to believe she wouldnt mind; I will get to that. Right now its enough to say that despite everything that happened that summer, I remain tender toward the bees.

July 1, 1964, I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations.

Bees swarm before death, shed said. Rosaleen had worked for us since my mother died. My daddywho I called T. Ray because Daddy never fit himhad pulled her out of the peach orchard, where shed worked as one of his pickers. She had a big round face and a body that sloped out from her neck like a pup tent, and she was so black that night seemed to seep from her skin. She lived alone in a little house tucked back in the woods, not far from us, and came every day to cook, clean, and be my stand-in mother. Rosaleen had never had a child herself, so for the last ten years Id been her pet guinea pig. Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about this one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind. Honestly, I wasnt that disturbed by the idea. Every one of those bees could have descended on me like a flock of angels and stung me till I died, and it wouldnt have been the worst thing to happen. People who think dying is the worst thing dont know a thing about life.

My mother died when I was four years old. It was a fact of life, but if I brought it up, people would suddenly get interested in their hangnails and cuticles, or else distant places in the sky, and seem not to hear me. Once in a while, though, some caring soul would say, Just put it out of your head, Lily. It was an accident. You didnt mean to do it.

That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, Mother, forgive. Please forgive, and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years. The next ten thousand years she would fix my hair. She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it. You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. My hair was constantly going off in eleven wrong directions, and T. Ray, naturally, refused to buy me bristle rollers, so all year Id had to roll it on Welchs grape juice cans, which had nearly turned me into an insomniac. I was always having to choose between decent hair and a good nights sleep. I decided I would take four or five centuries to tell her about the special misery of living with T. Ray. He had an orneriness year-round, but especially in the summer, when he worked his peach orchards daylight to dusk. Mostly I stayed out of his way. His only kindness was for Snout, his bird dog, who slept in his bed and got her stomach scratched anytime she rolled onto her wiry back. Ive seen Snout pee on T. Rays boot and it not get a rise out of him. I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T. Ray. Hed gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something. I kicked back the sheets. The room sat in perfect stillness, not one bee anywhere. Every minute I looked at the clock on my dresser and wondered what was keeping them. Finally, sometime close to midnight, when my eyelids had nearly given up the strain of staying open, a purring noise started over in the corner, low and vibrating, a sound you could almost mistake for a cat. Moments later shadows moved like spatter paint along the walls, catching the light when they passed the window so I could see the outline of wings. The sound swelled in the dark till the entire room was pulsating, till the air itself became alive and matted with bees. They lapped around my body, making me the perfect center of a whirlwind cloud. I could not hear myself think for all the bee hum. I dug my nails into my palms till my skin had nearly turned to herringbone. A person could get stung half to death in a roomful of bees. Still, the sight was a true spectacle. Suddenly I couldnt stand not showing it off to somebody, even if the only person around was T. Ray. And if he happened to get stung by a couple of hundred bees, well, I was sorry. I slid from the covers and dashed through the bees for the door. I woke him by touching his arm with one finger, softly at first, then harder and harder till I was jabbing into his flesh, marveling at how hard it was.

T. Ray bolted from bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. I dragged him toward my room, him shouting how this better be good, how the house damn well better be on fire, and Snout barking like we were on a dove shoot.

Bees! I shouted.

Theres a swarm of bees in my room! But when we got there, theyd vanished back into the wall like they knew he was coming, like they didnt want to waste their flying stunts on him.

Goddamn it, Lily, this aint funny.

I looked up and down the walls. I got down under the bed and begged the very dust and coils of my bedsprings to produce a bee.

They were here, I said.

Flying everywhere.

Yeah, and there was a goddamn herd of buffalo in here, too.

Listen, I said.

You can hear them buzzing.

He cocked his ear toward the wall with pretend seriousness.

I dont hear any buzzing, he said, and twirled his finger beside his temple.

I guess they must have flown out of that cuckoo clock you call a brain. You wake me up again, Lily, and Ill get out the Martha Whites, you hear me?

Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly. Still, I couldnt let the matter go entirelyT. Ray thinking I was so desperate I would invent an invasion of bees to get attention. Which is how I got the bright idea of catching a jar of these bees, presenting them to T. Ray, and saying, Now whos making things up?