Fourteen-year-old Lily Owen is on the run in South Carolina, USA in Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees.
It’s 1964, and the Civil Rights Act has just gone into effect, giving black people the right to vote. When Lily’s housekeeper Rosaleen meets three racist white townsmen on her way into town to register for the vote, the three men have her thrown into jail.
So enterprising young Lily, who accidentally shot her mother when she was just a baby, springs Rosaleen from the jail. She’s found a picture of a black Madonna with ’Tiburon, S.C’ printed on the back, in her attic. She’s convinced it will give her some clue about her long-dead mother, and her Dad’s so abusive she knows she can’t live with him much longer.
In Tiburon, Lily and Rosaleen are taken in by three black beekeeping sisters- May June and August, who she thinks may have known her mother, but she’s afraid to ask. Here Lily enters the world of beekeeping.
This book was warm, funny and touching. Some of the ideas presented in it make you think. As Lily gets to know her hosts better, she realizes how smart August is, and muses that although she’s always known black people were human, she never imagined that they could be as smart, if not smartER than her, and she realizes she’s more prejudiced than she knew.
Kidd shows the impact that the right to vote had on black people living in the southern United States. White people in South Carolina and Georgia simply can’t bear to think their way of life might change, and that they will actually have to INCLUDE blacks in all aspects of their lives.
Blacks can’t even enter ’white’ churches to pray.
We love them in the Lord, but they belong in their own places- Lily’s preacher tells her.
It reminded me of the ’gay marriage’ debate in North America. People so much want traditions to stay constant that they forget about the people they’re depriving of human rights.