Summary
Mr. Avery Gatson, the policeman, drives Lily and Rosaleen
to jail while the three white men follow in their pickup truck.
Lily is impressed by how resolute and strong Rosaleen seems. When
they arrive at the jail, the three men are waiting. They demand
that Rosaleen apologize. When she refuses, one hits her on the head
with a flashlight. Mr. Gatson then takes the two women into jail.
T. Ray soon comes to take Lily out, but they leave Rosaleen behind.
While driving home, T. Ray tells Lily that one of Rosaleen’s three
attackers—Franklin Posey—is the town’s worst racist and that he
will kill Rosaleen even if she does apologize. At home, T. Ray scolds
Lily harshly, but she stands up to him. She tells him that her mother
will not let him harm her, but he laughs at the idea that her dead
mother functions as her guardian angel. He tells Lily that Deborah
had already abandoned Lily when she returned home and was killed. This
comment hurts Lily deeply, but she does not believe T. Ray. She notices
that the bee jar next to her bed is empty, and she realizes that she
too needs to escape her own jar. She needs to run away.
On the road, Lily decides to head toward Tiburon, the
town written on the back of her mother’s black Mary picture. Lily
sets out to go to the jail. Halfway, Brother Gerald picks her up.
Lily lies to him about Rosaleen’s actions. At the jail, Lily learns
that Rosaleen has been taken to the hospital, and she leaves the
jail to go there instead. In the black patient wing of the Sylvan
Memorial Hospital, she discovers that the three men were allowed
into the jail to beat Rosaleen further—which is why Rosaleen is
in the hospital. Lily tricks the security guard with a phony phone
call and slips out of the hospital with Rosaleen. They head to Highway 40 and
begin to hitchhike. A black man driving a truck full of cantaloupe
picks them up. He drives them within three miles of Tiburon and
gives them each a cantaloupe for dinner. Under a full moon, they
head into a forest that reminds Lily of a setting from a Brother’s
Grimm fairy tale. There, Lily tells Rosaleen what T. Ray said about
her mother. Lily then tells Rosaleen why they are heading to Tiburon
and Rosaleen gets upset—accusing Lily of not taking Rosaleen into
account when she ran off. They fight and split apart. Later, however,
Lily comes across Rosaleen bathing in the river. Together, under
the moonlight, they strip naked and cleanse themselves.
The next day, Lily awakes feeling as if she slept next
to Thoreau’s Walden Pond. She feels as if today is the first day
of her new life. As she contemplates the black Mary picture, she
realizes that not only does she not know much about Mary, she has
never met a Catholic. She soon wakes Rosaleen, who says she dreamed
about Martin Luther King Jr., imagining that she painted her toenails
with his spit. They begin to walk toward town—both anointed in their
new lives. Lily, looking for a sign to offer her guidance, spots
the Frogmore General Store and heads in to buy some food for her
and Rosaleen. Inside, she tells the clerk that she has arrived in
town to visit her grandma, orders two pork meals and two cokes,
and steals some snuff for Rosaleen. She then notices a selection
of Black Madonna Honey jars. On them is the picture of the black
Mary picture she has from her mother. The clerk tells her that the
maker of this honey, August Boatwright, lives on the other side
of Tiburon. Convinced that she is somewhere her mother once was,
Lily goes outside to tell Rosaleen about her discovery. They also
buy a paper to see if their disappearance has made the news, and
discover that it has not.
Analysis
An undercurrent of religious spirituality runs through The
Secret Life of Bees. But this type of spirituality does
not resemble organized religions, such as Catholicism; rather, it
combines elements of magic, strange coincidences, and gut feelings.
Lily sometimes feel as if Deborah watches and protects her from
beyond the grave, and she goes off to Tiburon, S.C., simply because
those words were printed on the back of a picture once belonging
to her mother. She even claims to hear a voice telling her to leave
Sylvan and T. Ray. This decision signifies Lily’s impetuous nature,
as well as her desire to be sheltered and to feel as if she belonged—all
powerful religious drives. The picture belongs to a label for Black
Madonna Honey. Obviously this name has religious echoes, but the
experience itself has the feel of an eerie, spiritual coincidence.
At this point, the book begins to resemble a fable, as if its actions
were taking place in a parallel universe, which only dimly resembles
the real universe. Once they escape Sylvan, Lily and Rosaleen seem
to exist in this semimagical state, and Lily compares the area in
which they spend the night to the setting of a fairy tale. Rosaleen
even feels moved by the black Mary picture. Magic happens, these
chapters imply, if we trust ourselves and follow our instincts or
intuition.
Each scene of the novel offers Lily an opportunity to
learn something, to deepen her understanding, or to overcome a difficulty, because
the novel itself is a record of Lily’s process of growing up. In chapters 2 and 3,
Lily witnesses the effects of racism and begins to see how small
individual acts of rebellion might be used to eradicate institutionalized
racism. During the scene with the racist white men, Lily wishes
Rosaleen would apologize, and, to some degree, Lily gets angry at
Rosaleen for even putting herself into that situation by heading
to town to vote. As a child, Lily has trouble understanding the
power of people to effect change. In her mind, racism is an impenetrable
fortress that, while unfortunate, can nevertheless not be demolished.
To Lily—and to many others—things are the way they are because that
is the way they are, and nothing can change that. Rosaleen, however,
understands that she must exercise her legal right to vote, no matter
the costs to herself. The fact that Posey and his men stand in Rosaleen’s
way gives her a chance to stand up for her rights. Never once does
it enter her mind to apologize, because she believes the white men
are wrong. Lily’s misunderstanding of Rosaleen’s actions speaks
to her relative youth and inexperience and her inability—at this
stage, at least—to really empathize with Rosaleen’s experience as
a black woman in the South. By the end of the novel, Lily will learn
a great deal more about racial difference and bias in the South.
These chapters emphasize the importance of reading, writing, storytelling,
and using one’s imagination. In chapter 1,
we learned that Lily loves to read and write, and longs to be a
writer. In chapter 2, Kidd subtly alludes
to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
like Twain’s book, Kidd’s features a young white kid running off
into the woods with a black adult. Both pairs feel uncertainty during
their journey, but an overwhelming sense of freedom makes them believe
in themselves and each other. A river features prominently in both
stories: Huck and Jim raft down the river, away from their horrible
backgrounds, while Lily and Rosaleen bath naked in the river both
to make up from their fight and to symbolically baptize themselves
into their new life. Finally, in chapter 3,
Lily compares herself to another hero of American letters: Henry
David Thoreau. Thoreau’s book chronicles his experiences on Walden Pond
and describes his theories of self-reliance and spiritual simplicity.
Like Thoreau, Lily has set out in search of autonomy, from both T.
Ray and from the larger racist society of the South. This comparison
not only demonstrates Lily’s keen intelligence but also gives her strength
to continue her journey away from Sylvan and into the unknown.
