The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

The novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd opens in South Carolina during the 1960s, in the towns of Sylvan and Tiburon. The main protagonist Lily Melissa Owens, life has been shaped around her blurred memory of her mother, Deborah, after she was killed. When Lily’s black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, is arrested for insulting three racist men in their town of Sylvan. Then, Lily decides to spring them both free: herself escaping her neglectful and abusive father, T. Ray, and helping Rosaleen escape from the jail. The duo then escape to Tiburon - a town that they believes holds the secret to the past of her mother. When they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, August, May, and June Boatwright, Lily is introduced

Lily and Rosaleen arrive at the Boatwright sisters home, and are invited by August to stay with them in the honey house. Lily thinks, “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”(78). The key phrase “I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white” demonstrates the racism that Lily has developed from the society around her. The key phrase “I was surprised by this” indicates the unexpected prejudice everyone has for one another even though they try their best not to be against others because they are different. The author provides this through the main character, Lily, that racism can be developed from exposure through others at any age, resulting in children inheriting a racist point of view from their family and those around them. Later on, Lily is thinking about the racism that is prominently shown in her society. “It washed over me for the first time in my life 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

Lily arrives at the Boatwright sisters house and sees the statue of the black Mary for the first time. While she is viewing the black Madonna, she gets mixed feelings of hating herself and adoring herself and begins to feel guilt. “Everything about that smile said, Lily Owens, I know you down to the core. I felt she knew what a lying, murdering, hating person I really was. How I hated T. Ray, and the girls at school, but mostly myself for taking away my mother”(71). The guilt that Lily feels is not only from her mother’s death but for how she acted towards everyone. Lily is dishonest to August, May and June Boatwright when she asks them if Rosaleen and herself can stay by telling the sisters that in addition to her mother dying when she was little, her father died in a tractor accident a month ago and she has an aunt to go to after a while in Virginia. Lily shows resentment for T. Ray due to the way he treats her like in an abusive manner and does not think about how he might have felt when he lost Deborah. She also resents her mother when she finds out that Deborah left her with T. Ray when she ran away from the depression of being with a man she did not love. Later on, May commits suicide by drowning herself in a river and Zach is brought by Clayton from the jail to see May in her casket in order honor her memory. When he looks upon May in the casket, he sees her face and begins to cry. He is