The Secret Life of Bees

by Kidd, Sue Monk

  “If we can find some place open when we get to town, I’ll go in and get us some food,” I told her.

  “And what’re we gonna do for beds?” she said.

  “If they don’t have a motel, we’ll have to rent a room.”

  She smiled at me then. “Lily, child, there ain’t gonna be any place that will take a colored woman. I don’t care if she’s the Virgin Mary, nobody’s letting her stay if she’s colored.”

  “Well, what was the point of the Civil Rights Act?” I said, coming to a full stop in the middle of the road. “Doesn’t that mean people have to let you stay in their motels and eat in their restaurants if you want to?”

  “That’s what it means, but you gonna have to drag people kicking and screaming to do it.”

  I spent the next mile in deep worry. I had no plan, no prospects of a plan. Until now I’d mostly believed we would stumble upon a window somewhere and climb through it into a brand-new life. Rosaleen, on the other hand, was out here biding time till we got caught. Counting it as summer vacation from jail.

  What I needed was a sign. I needed a voice speaking to me like I’d heard yesterday in my room saying, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open.

  I’ll take nine steps and look up. Whatever my eyes light on, that’s my sign. When I looked up, I saw a crop duster plunging his little plane over a field of growing things, behind him a cloud of pesticides parachuting out. I couldn’t decide what part of this scene I represented: the plants about to be rescued from the bugs or the bugs about to be murdered by the spray. There was an off chance I was really the airplane zipping over the earth creating rescue and doom everywhere I went.

  I felt miserable.

  The heat had been gathering as we walked, and it now dripped down Rosaleen’s face.

  “Too bad there’s not a church around here where we could steal some fans,” she said.

  From far away the store on the edge of town looked about a hundred years old, but when we got up to it, I saw it was actually older. A sign over the door said FROGMORE STEW GENERAL STORE AND RESTAURANT. SINCE 1854.

  General Sherman had probably ridden by here and decided to spare it on the basis of its name, because I’m sure it hadn’t been on looks. The whole front of it was a forgotten bulletin board: Studebaker Service, Live Bait, Buddy’s Fishing Tournament, Rayford Brothers’ Ice Plant, Deer Rifles $45, and a picture of a girl wearing a Coca-Cola bottle cap on her head. A sign announced a gospel sing at the Mount Zion Baptist Church that took place back in 1957, if anyone wanted to know.

  My favorite thing was the fine display of car tags nailed up from different states. I would like to have read every single one, if I’d had the time.

  In the side yard a colored man lifted the top of a barbecue pit made from an oil drum, and the smell of pork lathered in vinegar and pepper drew so much saliva from beneath my tongue I actually drooled onto my blouse.

  A few cars and trucks were parked out front, probably belonging to people who cut church and came here straight from Sunday school.

  “I’ll go in and see if I can buy some food,” I said.

  “And snuff. I need some snuff,” said Rosaleen.

  While she slumped on a bench near the barbecue drum, I stepped through the screen door into the mingled smells of pickled eggs and sawdust, beneath dozens of sugar-cured hams dangling from the ceiling. The restaurant was situated in a section at the back while the front of the store was reserved for selling everything from sugarcane stalks to turpentine.

  “May I help you, young lady?” A small man wearing a bow tie stood on the other side of a wooden counter, nearly lost behind a barricade of scuppernong jelly and Sweet Fire pickles. His voice was high-pitched, and he had a soft, delicate look to him. I could not imagine him selling deer rifles.

  “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,” he said.

  “I’m not from here. I’m visiting my grandmother.”

  “I like it when children spend time with their grandparents,” he said. “You can learn a lot from older folks.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I learned more from my grandmother than I did the whole eighth grade.”

  He laughed like this was the most comical thing he’d heard in years. “Are you here for lunch? We have a Sunday-plate special—barbecue pork.”

  “I’ll take two of them to go,” I said. “And two Coca-Colas, please.”

  While I waited for our lunch, I wandered along the store aisles, stocking up for supper. Packages of salted peanuts, buttermilk cookies, two pimiento-cheese sandwiches in plastic, sour balls, and a can of Red Rose snuff. I piled it on the counter.

  When he returned with the plates and drink bottles, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but it’s Sunday. I can’t sell anything from the store, just the restaurant. Your grandma ought to know that. What’s her name anyway?”

  “Rose,” I said, reading it off the snuff can.

  “Rose Campbell?”

  “Yes, sir. Rose Campbell.”

  “I thought she only had grandboys.”

  “No, sir, she’s got me, too.”

  He touched the bag of sour balls. “Just leave it all here. I’ll put it back.”

  The cash register pinged, and the drawer banged out. I rummaged in my bag for the money and paid him.

  “Could you open the Coke bottles for me?” I asked, and while he walked back toward the kitchen, I dropped the Red Rose snuff in my bag and zipped it up.

  Rosaleen had been beaten up, gone without food, slept on the hard ground, and who could say how long before she’d be back in jail or even killed? She deserved her snuff.

  I was speculating how one day, years from now, I would send the store a dollar in an envelope to cover it, spelling out how guilt had dominated every moment of my life, when I found myself looking at a picture of the black Mary. I do not mean a picture of just any black Mary. I mean the identical, very same, exact one as my mother’s. She stared at me from the labels of a dozen jars of honey. BLACK MADONNA HONEY, they said.

  The door opened, and a family came in fresh from church, the mother and daughter dressed alike in navy with white Peter Pan collars. Light streamed in the door, hazy, warped, blurred with drizzles of yellow. The little girl sneezed, and her mother said, “Come here, let’s wipe your nose.”

  I looked again at the honey jars, at the amber lights swimming inside them, and made myself breathe slowly.

  I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.

  I thought about the bees that had come to my room at night, how they’d been part of it all. And the voice I’d heard the day before, saying, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open, speaking as plain and clear as the woman in navy speaking to her daughter.

  “Here’s your Coca-Colas,” the bow-tied man was saying.

  I pointed to the honey jars. “Where did you get those?”

  He thought the tone of shock in my voice was really consternation. “I know what you mean. A lot of folks won’t buy it ’cause it’s got the Virgin Mary pictured as a colored woman, but see, that’s because the woman who makes the honey is colored herself.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “August Boatwright,” he said. “She keeps bees all over the county.”

  Keep breathing, keep breathing. “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Oh, sure, it’s the darndest house you ever saw. Painted like Pepto-Bismol. Your grandmother surely’s seen it—you go through town on Main Street till it turns into the highway to Florence.”

  I walked to the door. “Thanks.”

  “You tell your grandma hello for me,” he said.

  Rosaleen’s snores were making the bench slats tremble. I gave her a shake. “Wake up. Here’s your snuff, but put it in your pocket, ’cause I didn’t exactly pay for it.”

  “You stole it?” she said.

  “I had to, ’cause they don
’t sell items from the store on Sunday.”

  “Your life has gone straight to hell,” she said.

  I spread our lunch out like a picnic on the bench but couldn’t eat a bite of it till I told her about the black Mary on the honey jar and the beekeeper named August Boatwright.

  “Don’t you think my mother must’ve known her?” I said. “It couldn’t be just a coincidence.”

  She didn’t answer, so I said louder, “Rosaleen? Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I don’t want you getting your hopes up too much, is all.” She reached over and touched my cheek. “Oh, Lily, what have we gone and done?”

  Tiburon was a place like Sylvan, minus the peaches. In front of the domed courthouse someone had stuck a Confederate flag in the mouth of their public cannon. South Carolina was Dixie first, America second. You could not get the pride of Fort Sumter out of us if you tried.

  Strolling down Main Street, we moved through long blue shadows cast from the two-story buildings that ran the length of the street. At a drugstore, I peered through the plate glass at a soda fountain with chrome trim, where they sold cherry Cokes and banana splits, thinking that soon it would not be just for white people anymore.

  We walked past Worth Insurance Agency, Tiburon County Rural Electric office, and the Amen Dollar Store, which had Hula Hoops, swim goggles, and boxes of sparklers in the window with SUMMER FUN spray-painted across the glass. A few places, like the Farmers Trust Bank, had GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT signs in their windows, sometimes with a bumper sticker across the bottom saying AFFIRMATION VIETNAM.

  At the Tiburon post office I left Rosaleen on the sidewalk and stepped inside to where the post office boxes and the Sunday newspapers were kept. As far as I could tell, there were no wanted posters in there of me and Rosaleen, and the front-page headline in the Columbia paper was about Castro’s sister spying for the CIA and not a word about a white girl breaking a Negro woman out of jail in Sylvan.

  I dropped a dime into the slot and took one of the papers, wondering if the story was inside somewhere. Rosaleen and I squatted on the ground in an alley and spread out the paper, opening every page. It was full of Malcolm X, Saigon, the Beatles, tennis at Wimbledon, and a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, that closed down rather than accept Negro guests, but nothing about me and Rosaleen.

  Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

  Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers. The workers cooperate in the food-gathering, nest-building and rearing the offspring. Males are reared only at the times of year when their presence is required.

  —Bees of the World

  Chapter Four

  The woman moved along a row of white boxes that bordered the woods beside the pink house, a house so pink it remained a scorched shock on the back of my eyelids after I looked away. She was tall, dressed in white, wearing a pith helmet with veils that floated across her face, settled around her shoulders, and trailed down her back. She looked like an African bride.

  Lifting the tops off the boxes, she peered inside, swinging a tin bucket of smoke back and forth. Clouds of bees rose up and flew wreaths around her head. Twice she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually reemerged like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night.

  We stood across the road, Rosaleen and I, temporarily mute. Me out of awe for the mystery playing out and Rosaleen because her lips were sealed with Red Rose snuff.

  “She’s the woman who makes the Black Madonna Honey,” I said. I was unable to take my eyes off her, the Mistress of Bees, the portal into my mother’s life. August.

  Rosaleen, wilting, spit a stream of black juice, then wiped away the mustache of perspiration above her lip. “I hope she makes honey better than she picks out paint.”

  “I like it,” I announced.

  We waited till she went inside, then crossed the highway and opened the gate in the picket fence that was about to topple over from the weight of Carolina jasmine. Add that to all the chive, dillweed, and lemon balm growing around the porch and the smell could knock you over.

  We stood on the porch in the pink light shining off the house. June bugs flickered all around, and music notes floated from inside, sounding like a violin, only a lot sadder.

  My heart kicked in. I asked Rosaleen if she could hear it beating, it was that loud.

  “I don’t hear nothing but the Good Lord asking me what I’m doing here.” She spit what I hoped was the last of her snuff.

  I knocked on the door while she muttered a slew of words under her breath: Give me strength…Baby Jesus…Lost our feeble minds.

  The music stopped. In the corner of my eye I caught a slight movement at the window, a venetian blind slit open, then closed.

  When the door opened, it was not the woman in white but another one wearing red, her hair cut so short it resembled a little gray, curlicue swim cap pulled tight over her scalp. Her face stared at us, suspicious and stern. I noticed she carried a musical bow tucked under her arm like a riding whip. It crossed my mind she might use it on us.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you August Boatwright?”

  “No, I’m June Boatwright,” she said, her eyes sweeping over the stitches on Rosaleen’s forehead. “August Boatwright is my sister. You came to see her?”

  I nodded, and simultaneously another woman appeared, with bare feet. She wore a green-and-white sleeveless gingham dress and short braids that stuck straight out all over her head.

  “I’m May Boatwright,” she said. “I’m August’s sister, too.” She smiled at us, one of those odd grins that let you know she was not an altogether normal person.

  I wished June with her whip would grin, too, but she only looked annoyed.

  “Is August expecting you?” she said, directing her words to Rosaleen.

  Of course Rosaleen jumped in ready to spill the whole story. “No, see, Lily has this picture—”

  I broke in. “I saw a honey jar back at the store, and the man said…”

  “Oh, you’ve come for honey. Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on in the front parlor. I’ll get August.”

  I shot a look at Rosaleen that said, Are you crazy? Don’t tell them about the picture. We were going to have to get our stories straight, that was for sure.

  Some people have a sixth sense, and some are duds at it. I believe I must have it, because the moment I stepped into the house I felt a trembling along my skin, a traveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn’t.

  I smelled furniture wax everywhere. Somebody had gone over the entire parlor with it, a big room with fringed throw rugs, an old piano with a lace runner, and cane-bottom rockers draped with afghans. Each chair had its own little velvet stool sitting before it. Velvet. I went over and rubbed my hand across one of them.

  Next I walked over to a drop-leaf table and sniffed a beeswax candle that smelled precisely like the furniture wax. It sat in a star-shaped holder next to a jigsaw puzzle in progress, though I couldn’t tell what picture it would make. A wide-mouthed milk bottle filled with gladiolus was perched on another table under the window. The curtains were organdy, not your average white organdy but silver-gray, so the air came through with a slightly smoky shimmer.

  Imagine walls with nothing on them but mirrors. I counted five of them, each one with a big brass frame around it.

  Then I turned around and looked back toward the door where I’d come in. Over in the corner was a carving of a woman nearly three feet tall. She was one of those figures that had leaned out from the front of a ship in olden times, so old she could have been on the Santa María with Columbus for all I knew.

 
She was black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through. Her right arm was raised, as if she was pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist. It gave her a serious look, like she could straighten you out if necessary.

  Even though she wasn’t dressed up like Mary and didn’t resemble the picture on the honey jar, I knew that’s who she was. She had a faded red heart painted on her breast and a yellow crescent moon, worn down and crooked, painted where her body would have blended into the ship’s wood. A candle inside a tall red glass threw glints and glimmers across her body. She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one. I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up.

  The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked back from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest had ached then, too, this very same way.

  The lips on the statue had a beautiful, bossy half smile, the sight of which caused me to move both my hands up to my throat. 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.

  I wanted to cry, but then, in the next instant, I wanted to laugh, because the statue also made me feel like Lily the Smiled-Upon, like there was goodness and beauty in me, too. Like I really had all that fine potential Mrs. Henry said I did.

  Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.

  I stepped closer to her and caught the faint scent of honey coming from the wood. May walked over and stood beside me, and I could smell nothing then but the pomade on her hair, onions on her hands, vanilla on her breath. Her palms were pink like the bottoms of her feet, her elbows darker than the rest of her, and for some reason the sight of them filled me with tenderness.