The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

In Sylvan we’d had a rumor at the first of the summer about a busload of people from New York City showing up to integrate the city pool. Talk about a panic. We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life.

We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions.

He had sandy hair, and bushy eyebrows that curled toward his blue eyes, and smile crinkles in his face that signaled a good person.

Thirty-two names for love. Was it unthinkable he could speak one of them to me, even the one reserved for lesser things like peanuts in your Coke? Was it so out of the question that T. Ray knew I loved the color blue? What if he was home missing me, saying, Why oh why didn’t I love her better?

Zach returned holding a big brown book that looked half moldy with age. “Look what Mr. Clayton gave me,” he said, and honestly, you would have thought it was a six-pound baby he’d birthed by the proud look of him.

It had been my experience for nearly a year that uttering the words “female trouble” could get me into places I wanted to go and out of places I didn’t.

D—DESPICABLE A—ANGRY D—DUD OF A FATHER D—DISAPPPOINTMENT Y—YOKE AROUND MY NECK

Writing this is not the Jesus–Others–Yourself philosophy of life, but it brings me J–O–Y to finally say these things to your face. Love, Lily

I read the letter back, then tore it into tiny pieces. I felt relief to get all that out of my system, but I had lied about it bringing me joy. I almost wanted to write another letter that I would not send and say I’m sorry.

It is always a relief to empty your bladder. Better than sex, that’s what Rosaleen said. As good as it felt, though, I sincerely hoped she was wrong.

my hand just went automatically to my heart and stayed there. I told her, Fix me, please fix me. Help me know what to do. Forgive me. Is my mother all right up there with God? Don’t let them find us. If they find us, don’t let them take me back. If they find us, keep Rosaleen from being killed. Let June love me. Let T. Ray love me. Help me stop lying. Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people’s hearts.

I reached out and traced black Mary’s heart with my finger. I stood with the petals on my toes and pressed my palm flat and hard against her heart. I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother, I told her. You are the mother of thousands.

The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication—on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information. —The Honey Bee

August turned on the radio for the weather, but what we heard was how Ranger 7 had finally been launched to the moon in a place called the Sea of Clouds, how police were looking for the bodies of those three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and the terrible things happening in Vietnam. It ended with a story about what was happening “closer to home,” how black people from Tiburon, Florence, and Orangeburg were marching today all the way to Columbia asking the governor to enforce the Civil Rights Act.

“I was sending them love,” I said, feeling betrayed. August said, “Hot weather makes the bees out of sorts, I don’t care how much love you send them.”

“Do you think I could keep bees one day?” I asked. August said, “Didn’t you tell me this past week one of the things you loved was bees and honey? Now, if that’s so, you’ll be a fine beekeeper.

Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”

The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a min...

with her dander up.

She let go and sprawled back on the grass in convulsions of laughter. I plopped down next to her and laughed, too. We could not stop. I wasn’t exactly sure of everything we were laughing about—I was just glad we were doing it together.

Rosaleen, May, and August had returned to the business of being water nymphs. I looked back down at the ground where our bodies had lain side by side, the wet grasses pressed down, perfect depressions in the earth. I stepped over them with the utmost care, and, seeing how careful I was, June stepped over them, too, and then, to my shock, she hugged me. June Boatwright hugged me while our clothes made sweet, squishy sounds up and down our bodies.

right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.

In the honey house I reclined on my cot and told myself I could think about anything I wanted, except my mother, so naturally she was the only thing that wanted on the elevator.

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

Well, fine. I pulled out my bag and examined my mother’s picture. I wondered what it had been like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in her darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.

If I ever managed to get to heaven after everything I’d done, I hoped I would get just a few minutes for a private conference with God. I wanted to say, Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise? People’s lives were a mess.

Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don’t feel it hurting till you’ve walked another block.

There and there and there, always there. The things a mother should be.

The last thing I expected was to fall asleep, but when there’s a blow to the system, all the body wants to do is go to sleep and dream on it.

A roach is a creature no one can love, but you cannot kill it. It will go on and on and on. Just try to get rid of it.

And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it. I couldn’t go on biding time like there was no end of it, no end to this summer. I felt tears spring up. I would have to come clean. Whatever happened…well, it would just happen.

that same half smile, half sneer I had seen on T. Ray’s face a thousand times, the sort of look conjured from power without benefit of love,

I knew that being a snitch was considered the lowest sort of person, but I wanted him to point his finger and say, The one over there. He did it. That way he could climb back into the honey truck and we would be on our way.

I had never been more present. The blue in the shadows, the shape of them against the house, how they looked like certain unkind animals—a crocodile, a grizzly bear—the smell of Alka-Seltzer circulating over Clayton Forrest’s head, the white part in his hair, the weight of our caring strapped around our ankles. We could hardly walk for it.

I saw a shiny film across her eyes—the beginning of tears. Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold, or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you. I felt like we were all adrift in the world, and all we had was the wet fire in August’s eyes. But it was enough.

It was plain Rosaleen had fire in her, too. Not hearth fire, like August, but fire that burns the house down, if necessary, to clean up the mess inside it. Rosaleen reminded me of the statue of Our Lady in the parlor, and I thought, If August is the red heart on Mary’s chest, Rosaleen is the fist.

Wilt Chamberlain

He opened a door into a corridor that led to a single row of four jail cells, each of them holding a black boy. The smell of sweating bodies and sour urinals almost overpowered me. I wanted to bring my fingers up to pinch my nose, but I knew that would be the worst insult. They couldn’t help that they smelled.

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

Zach seemed as if he wanted to ask me something. He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I’ll write this all down for you,” I said. “I’ll put it in a story.” I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to ask me, but it’s something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

I felt somebody should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one and say, We are sorry, but something strong and lasting had to do this for May, and you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.

A night bird was singing from a tree branch, just singing its heart out, urgent and feverish, like it was put there to sing the moon up to the top of the sky.

“Now, what was your last name again?” he said. “Williams,” I said. I had told him this twice already, so I had to wonder what kind of educational requirements they had for policemen in Tiburon. It looked like the same ones as Sylvan.

He was actually writing this down. Why? I wanted to yell at him, This is not about me and Rosaleen and Aunt Bernie’s operation. This is about May. She is dead, or haven’t you noticed? I should’ve been in my room right then crying my eyeballs out, and here I was having the stupidest conversation of my life.

I looked down and saw the claw-footed tub wearing the red socks May had put on its porcelain feet. I smiled then; I couldn’t help it. It was the side of May I never wanted to forget. I closed my eyes, and all the best pictures of her came to me. I saw her corkscrew braids glistening in the sprinkler, her fingers arranging the graham-cracker crumbs, working so hard on behalf of a single roach’s life. And that hat she wore the day she danced the conga line with the Daughters of Mary. Mostly, though, I saw the blaze of love and anguish that had come so often into her face. In the end it had burned her up.

“We sit with her so we can tell her good-bye. It’s called a vigil. Sometimes people have a hard time letting death sink in, they can’t say good-bye. A vigil helps us do that.”

There is nothing like a small joke at a vigil to help you relax.

When I peered up at her, though, she was brushing tears off her face, looking for a handkerchief in her pocket, and I knew it would be selfish to pour this into her cup when it was already to the brim with grief for May.

June played with her eyes closed, as if May’s spirit getting into heaven depended solely on her. You have never heard such music, how it made us believe death was nothing but a doorway.

When August turned Zach loose, I saw how much skinnier he looked. He stood there watching me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. I walked up to him, wishing I knew the right thing to say. A breeze tossed a piece of my hair across my face, and he reached out and brushed it away. Then he pulled me hard against his chest and held me for a few moments.