The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

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.

He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

“I expect this out of boys, Lily—you can’t blame them—but I expect more out of you. You act no better than a slut.”

🙄 it's not a girl around the world who hasn't heard this i feel like 😭

The milk left a moon crescent on the darkness of her upper lip, which she didn’t bother to wipe away. Later I would remember that, how she set out, a marked woman from the beginning.

I heard a voice say, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open. In a matter of seconds I knew exactly what I had to do—leave.

Pious people have always gotten on my nerves.

Mr. Gaston looked over at Brother Gerald, that all-knowing look men give each other when a female acts the least bit hysterical. “Settle down, now,” he said to me.

Fumbling to get my shoes on, I felt the same old grief I’d known in church every single Mother’s Day. Mother, forgive.

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

pith

The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.

organdy,

She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one.

Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.

The secret of a good lie is don’t overly explain, and throw in one good detail.

I stood there wondering who she was talking to, who was Miss Williams, when I remembered I was Lily Williams now. That’s the other secret to lying—you have to keep your stories straight.

“It separates out the honey,” she said. “Takes out the bad stuff, leaves in the good. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.”

Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets—it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me.

T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

As I walked, I began to hear the sound of running water. It’s impossible to hear that sound and not go searching for the source.

The first week at August’s was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

Singing made me feel like a regular person again.

She played music for dying people, going to their homes and even to the hospital to serenade them into the next life. I had never heard of such a thing, and I would sit at the table drinking sweet iced tea, wondering if this was the reason June smiled so little. Maybe she was around death too much.

“But she’s white, August.” This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being white. A hot wave passed through my body. “Righteous indignation” is what Brother Gerald called it.

There was no difference between my piss and June’s. That’s what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss.

He filled us in on an integration parade in St. Augustine that got attacked by a mob of white people, about white vigilante groups, fire hoses, and tear gas. We got all the totals. Three civil rights workers killed. Two bomb blasts. Three Negro students chased with ax handles.

Since Mr. Johnson signed that law, it was like somebody had ripped the side seams out of American life.

I felt white and self-conscious sitting there, especially with June in the room. Self-conscious and ashamed.

“May and June and I take our mother’s Catholicism and mix in our own ingredients. I’m not sure what you call it, but it suits us.”

When we finished saying Hail Mary about three hundred times, we said our personal prayers silently, which was kept to a minimum, since our knees would be killing us by then.

She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and long pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle.

Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.

Everything just comes into her—all the suffering out there—and she feels as if it’s happening to her. She can’t tell the difference.”

that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it?

I couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten the way she was—one minute laughing and the next overrun with everybody’s misery. The last thing I wanted was to be like that, but I didn’t want to be like T. Ray either, immune to everything but his own selfish life. I didn’t know which was worse.

My chest hurt from feeling things.

The worst thing was lying there wanting my mother. That’s how it had always been; my longing for her nearly always came late at night when my guard was down.

I have noticed that if you look carefully at people’s eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away. June’s eyes turned dull and hard when she looked at me.

“Where do you come from?” he asked me. This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together. It was rare, though, for Negroes to ask white people where they’re from, because there was nothing much to be gained from it, as their stories weren’t that likely to link up.

If this was not enough, they wore clip-on earbobs of various colored rhinestones and circles of rouge on their brown cheeks. I thought they were beautiful.

“And Mary said…Behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things…. He hath scattered the proud…. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”

“Everyone knew the mother of Jesus was named Mary, and that she’d seen suffering of every kind. That she was strong and constant and had a mother’s heart. And here she was, sent to them on the same waters that had brought them here in chains. It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered.”

“Our Lady filled their hearts with fearlessness and whispered to them plans of escape. The bold ones fled, finding their way north, and those who didn’t lived with a raised fist in their hearts. And if ever it grew weak, they would only have to touch her heart again.

“The people called her Our Lady of Chains. They called her that not because she wore chains…” “Not because she wore chains,” the Daughters chanted. “They called her Our Lady of Chains because she broke them.”

My body felt numb. I thought how nice it would be to grow smaller and smaller—until I was a dot of nothing.

Rosaleen had pulled up the skirt of her dress and was fanning me with it, showing most of her thighs. “Since when have you started fainting?” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, causing me to roll into her side. She scooped me into her arms. For some reason this caused my chest to fill with more sadness than I could bear, and I wrestled myself free, claiming I needed a drink of water.

I felt I’d stumbled upon an amazing secret—it was possible to close your eyes and exit life without actually dying. You just had to faint. Only I didn’t know how to make it happen, how to pull the plug so I could drain away when I needed to.