The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd surprised me as a reader. The novel begins as a young girl’s search to find her mother, but become so much more as the plot unfolds. A major theme in Kidd’s work is racism which is set against the Civil Rights Movement of 1964. The main character is Lily, a young teenage girl growing up in South Carolina. Although she is white, she is the voice of the novel as she confronts her own prejudices of blacks. As she grows, she realizes the truth about the racist South first hand.

The novel’s first encounter with racism occurs when Lily accompanies Rosaleen to town so Rosaleen, a black housekeeper, can register to vote for the first time. Rosaleen is confronted by a group of white men who harass her as she walked through town; her reaction is to pour tobacco spit on their shoes. Lily describes the scene by saying: “Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye”(Kidd 33). It is after this incident that Lily learns from T.Ray that her mother left her before the accident. This changes Lily’s character and she heads to free Rosaleen from jail.


Lily and Rosaleen escape to Tiburon, South Carolina where Lily hope to learn about her mother. They are taken in by the calendar sisters – August, June, and May- who are black women making a living as beekeepers. As the relationship between Lily and August strengthens, Lily learns the long lasting effects of racism. Here the reader learns of May’s twin April and how May gained her character. At the age of eleven April as a young black girl was shown the rules of prejudice in the South. August says the experience: “deflated her about life… she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then when April was fifteen, she killed herself… When April died, something in May died, too. She never was normal after that” (Kidd 97).


Throughout the novel, the reader is given a first hand view of how the Boatwright family openly takes Lily and Rosaleen into their family. Lily is embraced by the black sisters and treated as a daughter, which greatly impacts her view of racism. Towards the end of the novel we see the final impact of the racist society on May as she takes her own life. Lily learns an important lesson from August as the mother-like figure tells her: “There is nothing perfect. There is only life” (Kidd 256). This quote is very representative of the novel as a whole. Lily has learned that nothing about life is perfect, especially racism in the South. However, it is a part of life which she must accept. As the voice of the novel, Lily sets strong opinions about racism and shows the reader that race is not a barrier between love and family and in the end we all must move on and face life.