The Secret Life of Bees

by Kidd, Sue Monk

  “Yep, I’m white, all right,” I said. “White as can be.”

  There was nothing white about Zachary Lincoln Taylor. Even the whites of his eyes weren’t exactly white. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and short-cropped hair like most of the Negro boys wore, but it was his face I couldn’t help staring at. If he was shocked over me being white, I was shocked over him being handsome.

  At my school they made fun of colored people’s lips and noses. I myself had laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in. Now I wished I could pen a letter to my school to be read at opening assembly that would tell them how wrong we’d all been. You should see Zachary Taylor, I’d say.

  I wondered how August could forget to tell him a thing like the fact that I was white. She’d told me plenty about him. I knew she was his godmother. That his daddy had left him when he was small, that his mama worked as a lunchroom lady at the same school where June taught. He was about to be a junior at the black high school, where he made all A’s and played halfback on the football team. She’d said he ran like the wind, which might be his ticket to a college up north. This had struck me as better than I would manage, since I was probably headed for beauty school now.

  I said, “August went out to the Satterfield farm to check on some hives. She said I should help you in here. What do you want me to do?”

  “Grab some frames from the hive boxes over there and help me load the uncapper, I guess.”

  “So who do you like best, Fats Domino or Elvis?” I asked, dropping in the first frame.

  “Miles Davis,” he said.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Of course you don’t. But he’s the best trumpet player in the world. I’d give anything to play like him.”

  “Would you give up football?”

  “How do you know I play football?”

  “I know things,” I said, and smiled at him.

  “I can see that.” He was trying not to smile back.

  I thought, We’re going to be friends.

  He flipped the switch, and the extractor started to spin, building speed. “So how come you’re staying here?”

  “Me and Rosaleen are on our way to Virginia to live with my aunt. My daddy died in a tractor accident, and I haven’t had a mother since I was little, so I’m trying to get to my family up there before I get put in an orphanage or something.”

  “But how come you’re here?”

  “Oh, you mean at August’s. We were hitchhiking and got let out at Tiburon. We knocked on August’s door, and she gave us a bed. That’s it.”

  He nodded like this made some kind of actual sense.

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked, happy to change the subject.

  “All through high school. I come after school when it’s not football season, every Saturday and all summer. I bought a car with the money I made last year.”

  “That Ford out there?”

  “Yeah, it’s a ’59 Ford Fairlane,” he said.

  He flipped the switch on the extractor again, and the machine groaned while it came to a stop. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I could see my face in the surface of it. I figured he stayed up nights polishing it with his undershirts. I walked along giving it the white-glove inspection.

  “You can teach me to drive,” I said.

  “Not in this car.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you look like the kind of girl who’ll wreck something for sure.”

  I turned to face him, ready to defend myself, and saw he was grinning. And there was the one-side dimple again.

  “For sure,” he said. “Wreck something for sure.”

  Every day Zach and I worked in the honey house. August and Zach had already extracted most of the honey from her bee yards, but there were still several stacks of supers on pallets sitting around.

  We ran the warmer and caught the wax in a tin tub, then loaded the frames into the extractor and filtered the honey through brand-new nylon hose. August liked to keep a little pollen in her honey because it was good for people, so we saw to that, too. Sometimes we broke off pieces of comb and pushed them down into the jars before we filled them. You had to make sure they were new combs with no brood eggs in them, since nobody wanted to have baby bee larvae in their honey.

  And if we weren’t doing all that, we were filling candle molds with beeswax and washing mason jars till my hands turned stiff as corn husk from detergent.

  The only part of the day I dreaded was dinner, when I had to be around June. You’d think anybody who played music for dying people would be a nicer person. I couldn’t understand why she resented me so much. Somehow even me being white and imposing on their hospitality didn’t seem enough reason.

  “How are things coming with you, Lily?” she’d say every night at the table. Like she’d rehearsed this in the mirror.

  I’d say, “Things are coming fine. And how are they coming with you, June?”

  She would glance at August, who would be following all this like she was overcome with interest. “Fine,” June would say.

  Having gotten that out of the way, we would shake out our napkins and do our best to ignore each other the rest of the meal. I knew that August was trying to correct June’s rudeness toward me, but I wanted to say to her, Do you think me and June Boatwright give a damn how each other is coming? Just give up.

  One night after the Hail Marys, August said, “Lily, if you wish to touch Our Lady’s heart, you’re welcome, isn’t she, June?”

  I glanced at June, who gave me a forced smile.

  “Maybe some other time,” I said.

  I’m here to tell you, if I was dying on my cot in the honey house and the only thing that could save me was June’s change of heart, I would meet my death and shoot straight to heaven. Or maybe hell. I wasn’t even sure anymore.

  The best meal was lunch, which Zach and I ate under the cool of the pine trees. May fixed us bologna sandwiches nearly every single day. We could also count on candlestick salad, which meant half a banana standing up in a pineapple slice. “Let me light your candle,” she’d say, and strike an imaginary match. Then she’d fasten a bottled cherry on the tip of the banana with a toothpick. Like Zach and I were still in kindergarten. But we’d go along with her, acting all excited over her lighting the banana. For dessert we crunched cubes of lime Kool-Aid, which she’d frozen in ice trays.

  One day we sat on the grass after lunch, listening to the wind snap the sheets Rosaleen had hung on the clothesline.

  “What’s your favorite subject in school?” Zach asked.

  “English.”

  “I bet you like to write themes,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “As a matter of fact I do. I was planning on being a writer and an English teacher in my spare time.”

  “Was planning?” he said.

  “I don’t think I have much of a future now, being an orphan.” What I meant was being a fugitive from the law. Considering the state of things, I didn’t know if I’d even get back to high school.

  He studied his fingers. I could smell the sharp scent of his sweat. He had patches of honey on his shirt, which were attracting a horde of flies and causing him to swat incessantly.

  After a while he said, “Me either.”

  “You either what?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have much of a future either.”

  “Why not? You’re not an orphan.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m a Negro.”

  I felt embarrassed. “Well, you could play football for a college team and then be a professional player.”

  “Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don’t want to play football,” he said. “I wanna be a lawyer.”

  “That’s fine with me,” I said, a little annoyed. “I’ve just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that’s all. You’ve got to hear of these things before you can imagine them.”

  “Bullshit. You gotta imagine what’s never b
een.”

  I closed my eyes. “All right then, I’m imagining a Negro lawyer. You are a Negro Perry Mason. People are coming to you from all over the state, wrong-accused people, and you get at the truth at the very last minute by tricking the real criminal on the witness stand.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I bust their ass with the truth.” When he laughed, his tongue was grass green from Kool-Aid.

  I started calling him Zach the ass-busting lawyer. “Oh, look who’s here, Zach the ass-busting lawyer,” I’d say.

  It was along about this point Rosaleen started asking me what did I think I was doing—auditioning myself to get adopted by the calendar sisters? She said I was living in a dream world. “Dream world” became her favorite two words.

  It was living in a dream world to pretend we had a regular life when there was a manhunt going on, to think we could stay here forever, to believe I would find out anything worth knowing about my mother.

  Every time I shot back, What’s wrong with living in a dream world? And she’d say, You have to wake up.

  One afternoon when I was alone in the honey house, June wandered in looking for August. Or so she said. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So,” she said, “you’ve been here—what? Two weeks now?”

  How obvious can you get?

  “Look, if you want us to leave, me and Rosaleen will be on our way,” I said. “I’ll write my aunt, and she’ll send us bus money.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you didn’t remember your aunt’s last name, and now you know her name and her address.”

  “Actually, I knew it all along,” I said. “I was just hoping for a little time before we had to leave.”

  It seemed like her face softened some when I said that, but it could’ve been wishful thinking on my part.

  “Heavens to Betsy, what’s this talk about you leaving?” said August, standing in the doorway. Neither one of us had seen her come in. She gave June a hard look. “Nobody wants you to leave, Lily, till you’re good and ready.”

  Standing beside August’s desk, I fidgeted with a stack of papers. June cleared her throat. “Well, I need to get back and practice,” she said, and breezed out the door.

  August walked over and sat down in her desk chair. “Lily, you can talk to me. You know that, don’t you?”

  When I didn’t answer, she caught my hand and drew me to her, pulling me right down onto her lap. It was not mattress deep like Rosaleen’s but thin and angular.

  I wanted nothing more than to come clean with her. Go pull my bag from underneath the cot and bring out my mother’s things. I wanted to produce the black Mary picture and say, This belonged to my mother, this exact same, identical picture you put on your honey jars. And it has Tiburon, South Carolina, written on the back, so I know she must’ve been here. I wanted to hold up her photograph and say, Have you ever seen her? Take your time now. Think carefully.

  But I hadn’t yet pressed my hand to the black Mary’s heart in the parlor, and I was too afraid to say all this without having done at least that. I leaned against August’s chest, pushing aside my secret wanting, too afraid she’d say, No, I never saw this woman in my life. And that would be that. Not knowing anything at all was better.

  I struggled to my feet. “I guess I’ll go help in the kitchen.” I crossed the yard without a glance back.

  That night, when the darkness was weighed down with singing crickets and Rosaleen was snoring right along with them, I had myself a good cry. I couldn’t even say why. Just everything, I guess. Because I hated lying to August when she was so good to me. Because Rosaleen was probably right about dream worlds. Because I was pretty sure the Virgin Mary was not back there on the peach farm standing in for me the way she’d stood in for Beatrix.

  Neil came over most evenings and sat with June in the parlor while the rest of us watched The Fugitive on television in the den. August said she wished the fugitive would go ahead and find the one-armed man and get it over with.

  During commercials I pretended to go for water and instead crept down the hall, where I tried to make out what June and Neil were saying.

  “I’d like you to tell me why not,” I heard Neil say one evening.

  And June, “Because I can’t.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “Well, it’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “Look, I’m not gonna wait around forever,” Neil said.

  I was anticipating what June would say to that, when Neil came through the door without warning and caught me pressed against the wall listening to their most private sayings. He looked for a second like he might turn me over to June, but he left, banging the front door behind him.

  I hightailed it back to the den, but not before I heard the beginnings of a sob in June’s throat.

  One morning August sent Zach and me six miles out in the county to bring in the last of the supers to be harvested. Lord, it was hot, plus we had at least ten gnats per square inch of air.

  Zach drove the honey wagon as fast as it would go, which was about thirty miles an hour. The wind whipped my hair and flooded the truck with a weedy, new-mown smell.

  The roadsides were covered with fresh-picked cotton, blown from the trucks carrying it to the gin in Tiburon. Zach said the farmers had planted and harvested their cotton early this year because of the boll weevil. Scattered along the highway, it looked for all the world like snow, which made me wish for a blizzard to come cool things down.

  I went off into a daydream about Zach pulling the truck over because he couldn’t see to drive for the snow and us having a snowball fight, blasting each other with soft white snow cotton. I imagined us building a snow cave, sleeping with our bodies twined together to get warm, our arms and legs like black-and-white braids. This last thought shocked my system so bad I shivered. I stuck my hands under my arms, and my sweat was ice-water cold.

  “You all right?” asked Zach.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’re shaking over there.”

  “I’m fine. I do that sometimes.”

  I turned away and looked out the window, where there was nothing but fields and now and then a falling-down wooden barn or some old, abandoned colored house. “How much further?” I said in a way that suggested the excursion could not be over too soon.

  “You upset or something?”

  I refused to answer him, glaring instead through the dirty windshield.

  When we turned off the highway onto a beat-up dirt road, Zach said we were on property belonging to Mr. Clayton Forrest, who kept Black Madonna Honey and beeswax candles in the waiting room of his law office so his customers could buy them. Part of Zach’s job was going around to deliver fresh supplies of honey and candles to places that sold them on consignment.

  “Mr. Forrest lets me poke around his law office,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He tells me about the cases he’s won.”

  We hit a rut and bounced on the seat so hard our heads rammed into the truck roof, which for some reason flipped my mood upside down. I started to laugh like somebody was holding me down tickling my armpits. The more my head slammed against the truck, the worse it got, till I was having one big, hilarious seizure. I laughed the way May cried.

  At first Zach aimed for the ruts just to hear me, but then he got nervous because I couldn’t seem to stop. He cleared his throat and slowed way down till we were bounce-free.

  Finally it drained out of me, whatever it was. I remembered the pleasure of fainting that day during the Daughters of Mary meeting and thought now how much I would like to keel over right here in the truck. I envied turtles their shells, how they could disappear at will.

  I was conscious of Zach’s breathing, his shirt pulled across his chest, one arm draped on the steering wheel. The hard, dark look of it. The mystery of his skin.

  It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I’d honestly thought such a thing couldn’t happen, the way water
could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn’t have. Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by. You gotta imagine what’s never been, Zach had said.

  He stopped the honey wagon beside a cluster of twenty hives tucked in a thicket of trees, where the bees could have shade in the summer and shelter from the wind through the winter. Bees were more fragile than I ever imagined. If it wasn’t mites ruining them, it was pesticides or terrible weather.

  He climbed out and dragged a load of equipment off the back of the truck—helmets, extra supers, fresh brood frames, and the smoker, which he handed me to light. I moved through camphorweed and wild azalea, stepping over fire-ant mounds and swinging the smoker while he lifted the lids off the hives and peered inside looking for capped frames.

  He moved like a person with a genuine love of bees. I could not believe how gentle and softhearted he could be. One of the frames he lifted out leaked honey the color of plums.

  “It’s purple!” I said.

  “When the weather turns hot and the flowers dry up, the bees start sucking elderberry. It makes a purple honey. People will pay two dollars a jar for purple honey.”

  He dipped his finger into the comb and, lifting my veil, brought it close to my lips. I opened my mouth, let his finger slide in, sucking it clean. The sheerest smile brushed his lips, and heat rushed up my body. He bent toward me. I wanted him to lift back my veil and kiss me, and I knew he wanted to do it, too, by the way he fixed his eyes on mine. We stayed like that while bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon, a sound that no longer registered as danger. Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to.

  But instead of kissing me, he turned to the next hive and went right on with his work. The smoker had gone out. I followed behind him, and neither of us spoke. We stacked the filled supers onto the truck like the cat had our tongues, and neither of us said a word till we were back in the honey truck passing the city-limits sign.