The Secret Life of Bees

In May our Book Club will discuss Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees." This was a book that surprised me. Some of the works we have read have been way too depressing. This book is a book of hope.

It begins in the summer of 1964, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights movement. Lily, fourteen years old, has bees living in the walls of her room. Her father, T. Ray, is neglectful and contemptuous of her. Lily's mother is dead, and her death is a source of Lily's shame and guilt, because she remembers just enough to believe she is the one who accidentally shot her mother to death at the age of four.

Their maid, Rosaleen, decides she is going to go and register to vote. That's controversialin the south where they live, and Lily foresees danger. She accompanies Rosaleen and it goes badly. Rosaleen is accosted by three very bigoted men and she retaliates by pouring snuff juice on their shoes. For this insult both she and Lily are hauled off to jail, and T. Ray bails Lily out but punishes her by making her kneel on raw grits. He calls them the "white Marthas" and I don't know what the origin of that expression might be, unless it's a contrast with the black Mary we meet later on in the story.

Lily has two mementos of her mother, a photograph and a portrait of a black Madonna. On the back is written, "Tiburon, SC." Coincidentally (not), her mother's name was Deborah, which means "bee."

Lily helps Rosaleen escape from the hospital where she is recovering from a savage beating by the three men who accosted her. They head to Tiburon just because Lily believes her mother must have once been there. In a grocery store, Lily sees a jar of honey with the same black Madonna on the label, and realizes the connection. She's led by this synchronicity to the home of the Calendar sisters, May, June and August.

August is the beekeeper who manufactures the Black Madonna honey. When Lily and Rosaleen arrive August welcomes them and allows them to stay with the family. She teaches Lily how to help with harvesting the honey and making the beeswax candles August sells to retailers across the country.

June, however, is not so welcoming. Her attitude to Lily is harsh at first. She makes Lily feel like an outsider in a black home when Lily is the one white person. Later, though, her attitude softens.

May, on the other hand, is so sensitive as to be dysfunctional. Anything that upsets her starts her singing,"Oh, Susanna," and running out to her "wall," a homemade "Wailing Wall" where she writes her sorrows and prayers, and puts them between the stones she has piled up there. There was a twin to May, named April, but April could not stand the restrictions and humiliations of racism, and she committed suicide as a teenager.

In this home, Lily begins to flourish as a young woman should. She learns beekeeping and she takes part in religious ceremonies where the sisters and their friends worship the black Mary, a ship's masthead that has become their holy icon. It's a blend of Catholicism and their own, woman-identified worship, that gives them all a feeling of strength and solidarity. One or two men take part in these ceremonies as well.

Lily meets Zach, the student who has been helping August since he started high school, and a tenuous, forbidden love starts to grow between them. In that era, in the deep south, there is no "place or time" for a black boy and a white girl. Yet they do have a few stolen moments, apparently condoned by the other women. Zach is determined to become a lawyer and fight for civil rights, a determination that is only strengthened when he is jailed unfairly for supposedly throwing a bottle or rock at the police.

The bees, their honey, and their secret lives, as they work for and tend the queen,become a metaphor for the family that Lily has discovered. She has found her hive, with the sweetness of love. The black Mary has become her loving mother, the one she has yearned for, the one whose love she has missed out on all her life.

The symbolism of honey, bees, and the black Mary permeate the book. Synchronicities abound, and Lily discovers that her mother did indeed stay at the sisters' home when she ran away from T. Ray. Even Lily's name has a symbolic meaning.

T. Ray tracks her down and tries to force her to come back to the peach farm with him. Legally he has that right, but it turns out that August and the other women are able to convince him to let Lily stay. She's lived through May's suicide, June's marriage, and she's learned the full story about her mother. She's found her hive and her queen bee, and she's ready to become a woman.

I enjoyed this book immensely with its spiritual overtones, with the majesty of the downtrodden, "like royalty among us," as Lily says. Even with Zach, there is a bit of hope because they walk together in the halls of the white high school where he has boldly enrolled, and ignore the taunts and crumpled paper students throw at them.

Honey is a healing agent: that's recently been "discovered" though people closer to the earth have probably known it for centuries. Synchronicity and following her heart leads Lily to Tiburon where she finds her heart's desire.

Read this book!It's not brand new, and I missed it when it was, but if you missed it the first time around now is the time to read and savor it. This seems to be a book designed to be read during the summer heat, set as it is in the sweltering Carolina summertime.

Yopp!

In Dr. Seuss's classic, "Horton Hears a Who," every one of the tiny people on a speck of dust had to shout as loudly as they could in order to be heard by the other animals, who were intent on boiling the flower and locking Horton away in a cage. The infinitesimal Mayor of Whoville raced through the town to make sure everyone was doing his or her part.

It seems that way at first. People are shouting and singing, brass bands playing, drums thumping. But it's not enough. Finally in the very last building the Mayor discovers the smallest of all the Who's, a little child standing alone, doing nothing but playing with a yo-yo.

The Mayor grabs him and delivers a passionate speech. "This is your town's darkest hour!" he tells the little one. Convinced that destruction is near, the child at last opens his mouth and shouts out an amazingly loud, "YOPP!"

That one "yopp" puts it over and the other animals are able to hear that there are in fact sentient beings down there on that tiny dust speck. They are saved and Horton is a hero, instead of being caged as a lunatic.

That was one of my favorite stories as a little girl. Maybe that's why I keep answering the petitions that come to me in emails, why I keep sending my tiny donations and speaking out when I sense injustice.

I'm only one person shouting "Yopp!" but a whole lot of us little Who's got our voices heard last November, and now we at least have an administration that has its ear to the ground, listening for our "Yopps!"

And so I will continue to shout.

Dreams From My Father

I've just finished Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, a memoir of his childhood, youth and young adulthood. His struggles to come to terms with an absent father, his interracial and international background, and his entry into community organizing, are all here. Obama is an eloquent writer and it's a pleasure to read his descriptions of people, landscapes, and inner thoughts.

What this brings across to me is that President Obama has a handle on life in other nations and other cultures, that most Americans simply can't imagine. He's lived abroad and visited the country of his roots. How many of us have done that? I know when I toured other countries I felt removed from the people there, on the outside looking in at their daily lives. Tourists see museums and national monuments, not the living rooms of the inhabitants. Obama's experiences go so much deeper than that.

He has thought long and hard about his background and his image of his father, mostly compiled of stories told by his other relatives. He's thought long and hard about his racial status and about how to elevate the African American's status in our society.

It's refreshing and encouraging to have a President who can think, examine his own emotions, and write. I'd certainly recommend Dreams From My Father to anyone who would like a greater understanding of our new President.