The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

We had all thought President Kennedy was off his rocker when he declared we’d land a man on the moon. The Sylvan newspaper had called it a “Luna-tic Vision.” I took the article to class for the current-events bulletin board. We all said, A man on the moon. Right. But you can never underestimate the power of cutthroat competition. We wanted to beat the Russians—that was what made the world go around for us. Now it looked like we would.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.

“Look at her good, Lily,” she said, “’cause you’re seeing the end of something.” “I am?” “Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again.

My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.” August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, “Now it won’t ever be the same, not after they’ve landed up the...

How did bees ever become equated with sex? They do not live a riotous sex life themselves. A hive suggests cloister more than bordello. —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

“I’m Zachary Taylor,” he said. “Zachary Taylor was a president,” I told him. “Yeah, so I’ve heard.” He fished out a dogtag suspended on a chain under his shirt and held it up to my nose. “See right there. Zachary Lincoln Taylor.” He smiled then, and I saw he had a one-side dimple. It’s a feature that has always gotten to me.

If he was shocked over me being white, I was shocked over him being handsome.

At my school they made fun of colored people’s lips and noses. I myself had laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in. Now I wished I could pen a letter to my school to be read at opening assembly that would tell them how wrong we’d all been.

I could see my face in the surface of it. I figured he stayed up nights polishing it with his undershirts. I walked along giving it the white-glove inspection. “You can teach me to drive,” I said. “Not in this car.” “Why not?” “Because you look like the kind of girl who’ll wreck something for sure.” I turned to face him, ready to defend myself, and saw he was grinning. And there was the one-side dimple again. “For sure,” he said. “Wreck something for sure.”

You’d think anybody who played music for dying people would be a nicer person. I couldn’t understand why she resented me so much. Somehow even me being white and imposing on their hospitality didn’t seem enough reason.

“I don’t know if I’ll have much of a future either.” “Why not? You’re not an orphan.” “No,” he said. “I’m a Negro.” I felt embarrassed. “Well, you could play football for a college team and then be a professional player.” “Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don’t want to play football,” he said. “I wanna be a lawyer.”

Every time I shot back, What’s wrong with living in a dream world? And she’d say, You have to wake up.

I had myself a good cry. I couldn’t even say why. Just everything, I guess. Because I hated lying to August when she was so good to me. Because Rosaleen was probably right about dream worlds. Because I was pretty sure the Virgin Mary was not back there on the peach farm standing in for me the way she’d stood in for Beatrix.

He dipped his finger into the comb and, lifting my veil, brought it close to my lips. I opened my mouth, let his finger slide in, sucking it clean. The sheerest smile brushed his lips, and heat rushed up my body. He bent toward me. I wanted him to lift back my veil and kiss me, and I knew he wanted to do it, too, by the way he fixed his eyes on mine. We stayed like that while bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon, a sound that no longer registered as danger. Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to. But instead of kissing me, he turned to the next hive and went right on with his work.

Zach crossed the intersection. I could feel his eyes bore into the back of my head. “You mad at me?” he said. I meant to say, Yes, I most certainly am, because you think I will never amount to anything. But what came out of my mouth was something else, and it was embarrassingly stupid. “I will never throw rose petals to anybody,” I said, and then I broke down, the kind of crying where you’re sucking air and making heaving sounds like a person drowning. Zach pulled over on the side of the road, saying, “Holy moly. What’s the matter?” He wrapped one arm around me and pulled me across the seat to him.

but sitting there close to Zach, I knew I was crying because he had that one-side dimple I loved, because every time I looked at him I got a hot, funny feeling that circulated from my waist to my kneecaps, because I’d been going along being my normal girl self and the next thing I knew I’d passed through a membrane into a place of desperation. I was crying, I realized, for Zach.

I laid my head on his shoulder and wondered how he could stand me. In one short morning I had exhibited insane laughter, hidden lust, pissy behavior, self-pity, and hysterical crying. If I’d been trying to show him my worst sides, I could not have done a better job than this. He gave me a squeeze and spoke into my hair. “It’s gonna be all right.

My chest closed up. Fine without her. Was she out of her mind? “I don’t wanna wake up from the dream world,” I said, and midsentence my voice cracked, and the words twisted and turned in my mouth. She sat on the cot, the cot I now hated with a passion because it had driven her to May’s room. She pulled me down beside her. “I know you don’t, but I’ll be here when you do.

She patted my knee like old times. She patted, and neither of us said anything. We could’ve been back in the policeman’s car riding to jail for how I felt. Like I would not exist without her patting hand.

I stretched out my arms like I was pushing back invisible walls of air and, looking down, caught sight of my shadow on the floor, this skinny girl with wild hair curling up in the humidity, with her arms flung out and her palms erect like she was trying to stop traffic in both directions. I wanted to bend down and kiss her, for how small and determined she looked.

The whole time we worked, I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That’s what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love.

That night it felt strange to be in the honey house by myself. I missed Rosaleen’s snoring the way you’d miss the sound of ocean waves after you’ve gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn’t realize how it had comforted me. Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.

Two days later, after we had run ourselves into the ground harvesting the rest of the honey, Zach showed up with the prettiest notebook—green with rosebuds on the cover. He met me coming out of the pink house. “This is for you,” he said. “So you can get a head start on your writing.”

That’s when I knew I would never find a better friend than Zachary Taylor. I threw my arms around him and leaned into his chest. He made a sound like Whoa, but after a second his arms folded around me, and we stayed like that, in a true embrace. He moved his hands up and down my back, till I was almost dizzy.

Finally he unwound my arms and said, “Lily, I like you better than any girl I’ve ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me for even looking at girls like you.” I couldn’t restrain myself from touching his face, the place where his d...

My favorite, though, was one about Zach becoming the ass-busting lawyer and getting his own television show like Perry Mason. I read it to him during lunch one day, and he listened better than a child at story hour. “Move over, Willifred Marchant” was all he said.

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require its social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die. —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

(You could not stop a bee from working if you tried.)

People don’t realize how smart bees are, even smarter than dolphins. Bees know enough geometry to make row after row of perfect hexagons, angles so accurate you’d think they used rulers. They take plain flower juice and turn it into something everyone in the world loves to pour on biscuits.

But the main thing is they are hardworking to the point of killing themselves. Sometimes you want to say to them, Relax, take some time off, you deserve it.

“What else do you love, Lily?” No one had ever asked me this before. What did I love?

I wanted to add, And you, I love you, but I felt too awkward.

Because when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.”

I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn’t recognize them.

Mother would tease Our Lady; she’d say, ‘You know what? You should’ve had a girl instead.’”

August set down the jar she was working on, and there was a mix of sorrow and amusement and longing across her face, and I thought, She is missing her mother.

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, ’cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. ‘It comes from years of loving children and husbands,’ she’d say.”

I giggled. “Do you think that really happened?” “Well, yes and no,” she said. “Some things happen in a literal way, Lily. And then other things, like this one, happen in a not-literal way, but they still happen. Do you know what I mean?” I didn’t have a clue. “Not really,” I said. “What I mean is that the bees weren’t really singing the words from Luke, but still, if you have the right kind of ears, you can listen to a hive and hear the Christmas story somewhere inside yourself.

I sat there a minute and thought about the odd ways of life. If it wasn’t for a toothache, August wouldn’t be here. Or May or June, or Black Madonna Honey, and I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to her.

“I decided against marrying altogether. There were enough restrictions in my life without someone expecting me to wait on him hand and foot. Not that I’m against marrying, Lily. I’m just against how it’s set up.”

I was thinking, Well, it’s not just marriage that’s set up like that. What about me waiting on T. Ray hand and foot, and we were just father and daughter? Pour me some more tea, Lily. Polish my shoes, Lily. Go get the truck keys, Lily. I sincerely hoped she didn’t mean this sort of thing went on in a marriage.

“Weren’t you ever in love?” I asked. “Being in love and getting married, now, that’s two different things. I was in love once, of course I was. Nobody should go through life without falling in love.” “But you didn’t love him enough to marry him?” She smiled a...

We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.

“You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—” “They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so. “I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

The only males were the drones who sat around waiting to mate with the queen.

How could I live the whole rest of my life knowing these things? What could I ever do that would be good enough to make them go away? How come we couldn’t go back and fix the bad things we did?

Later my mind would remember the plagues God had been fond of sending early in his career, the ones designed to make the pharaoh change his mind and let Moses take the people out of Egypt.

Nobody could spit like Rosaleen. I’d had fantasies of her winning a hundred dollars in a spitting contest and the two of us going to a nice motel in Atlanta and ordering room service with the prize money.

There had been a few times, though, just after I woke up, when I thought about my old house, and I would miss it for a second or two before I remembered kneeling on the kitchen floor with grits digging into my kneecaps or trying to step around a great big pile of T. Ray’s nasty mood but usually landing right in it.

June made a pffff sound with her lips while August shook her head, and it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.