The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

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.

August Boatwright entered, wearing a pair of rimless glasses and a lime green chiffon scarf tied onto her belt. “Who’ve we got here?” she said, and the sound of her voice snapped me back to my ordinary senses.

She was almond-buttery with sweat and sun, her face corrugated with a thousand caramel wrinkles and her hair looking flour dusted, but the rest of her seemed decades younger.

“I’m Lily, and that’s Rosaleen,” I said, hesitating as June appeared in the doorway behind her. I opened my mouth without any sense of what I would say next. What came out couldn’t have surprised me more. “We ran away from home and don’t have any place to go,” I told her.

Any other day of my life I could have won a fibbing contest hands down, and that, that is what I came up with: the pathetic truth. I watched their faces, especially August’s. She took off her glasses and rubbed the depressions on each side of her nose. It was so quiet I could hear a clock ticking in another room.

August replaced her glasses, walked to Rosaleen, and examined the stitches on her forehead, the cut under her eye, the bruises along her temple and arms. “You look like you’ve been beaten.”

“She fell down the front steps when we were leaving,” I offered, returning to my natural fibbing habit.

August and June traded looks while Rosaleen narrowed her eyes, letting me know I’d done it again, speaking for her like she wasn’t even there.

“Well, you can stay here till you figure out what to do. We can’t have you living on the side of the road,” said August.

The intake of June’s breath nearly sucked the air from the room. “But, August—”

“They’ll stay here,” she repeated in a way that let me know who the big sister was and who the little sister was. “It’ll be all right. We’ve got the cots in the honey house.”

June flounced out, her red skirt flashing around the door.

“Thank you,” I said to August.

“You’re welcome. Now, sit down. I’ll get some orangeade.”

We got situated in the cane-bottom rockers while May stood guard, grinning her crazy-woman grin. She had great big muscles in her arms, I noticed.

“How come y’all have names from a calendar?” Rosaleen asked her.

“Our mother loved spring and summer,” May said. “We had an April, too, but…she died when she was little.” May’s grin dissolved, and out of nowhere she started humming “Oh! Susanna” like her life depended on it.

Rosaleen and I stared at her as her humming turned into hard crying. She cried like April’s death had happened only this second.

Finally August returned with a tray of four jelly glasses, orange slices stuck real pretty on the rims. “Oh, May, honey, you go on out to the wall and finish your cry,” she said, pointing her to the door and giving her a nudge.

August acted like this was the sort of normal behavior happening in every household in South Carolina. “Here you go—orangeade.”

I sipped. Rosaleen, however, downed hers so fast she let out a belch that the boys in my old junior high would have envied. It was unbelievable.

August pretended she didn’t hear it while I stared at the velvet footstool and wished Rosaleen could be more cultured.

“So you’re Lily and Rosaleen,” August said. “Do you have last names?”

“Rosaleen…Smith, and Lily…Williams,” I lied and then launched in. “See, my mother died when I was little, and then my father died in a tractor accident last month on our farm in Spartanburg County. I don’t have any other kin around here, so they were going to send me to a home.”

August shook her head. Rosaleen shook hers, too, but for a different reason.

“Rosaleen was our housekeeper,” I went on. “She doesn’t have any family but me, so we decided to go up to Virginia to find my aunt. Except we don’t have any money, so if you have any work for us to do while we’re here, maybe we could earn a little before heading on. We aren’t really in a hurry to get to Virginia.”

Rosaleen glared at me. For a minute there was nothing but ice clinking in our glasses. I hadn’t realized how sweltering the room was, how stimulated my sweat glands had gotten. I could actually smell myself. I cut my eyes over to the black Mary in the corner and back to August.

She put down her glass. I had never seen eyes that color, eyes the purest shade of ginger.

“I’m from Virginia myself,” she said, and for some reason this stirred up the current that had moved in my limbs when I’d first entered the room. “All right, then. Rosaleen can help May in the house, and you can help me and Zach with the bees. Zach is my main helper, so I can’t pay you anything, but at least you’ll have a room and some food till we call your aunt and see about her sending some bus money.”

“I don’t exactly know her whole name,” I said. “My father just called her Aunt Bernie; I never met her.”

“Well, what were you planning to do, child, go door to door in Virginia?”

“No, ma’am, just Richmond.”

“I see,” said August. And the thing was, she did. She saw right through it.

 

That afternoon, heat built up in the skies over Tiburon; finally it gave way to a thunderstorm. August, Rosaleen, and I stood on the screen porch that jutted off the back of the kitchen and watched the clouds bruise dark purple over the treetops and the wind whip the branches. We were waiting for a let-up so August could show us our new quarters in the honey house, a converted garage in the back corner of the yard painted the same hot-flamingo shade as the rest of the house.

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention.

August went back into the kitchen and returned with three aluminum pie pans and handed them out. “Come on. Let’s make a run for it. These will keep our heads dry, at least.”

August and I dashed into the downpour, holding the pans over our heads. Glancing back, I saw Rosaleen holding the pie pan in her hand, missing the whole point.

When August and I reached the honey house, we had to huddle in the door and wait on her. Rosaleen glided along, gathering rain in the pan and flinging it out like a child would do. She walked on puddles like they were Persian carpets, and when a clap of thunder boomed around us, she looked up at the drowned sky, opened her mouth, and let the rain fall in. Ever since those men had beaten her, her face had been so pinched and tired, her eyes dull like they’d had the light knocked out of them. Now I could see she was returning to herself, looking like an all-weather queen out there, like nothing could touch her.

If only she could get some manners.

The inside of the honey house was one big room filled with strange honey-making machines—big tanks, gas burners, troughs, levers, white boxes, and racks piled with waxy honeycombs. My nostrils nearly drowned in the scent of sweetness.

Rosaleen made gigantic puddles on the floor while August ran for towels. I stared at a side wall that was covered with shelves of mason jars. Pith helmets with netting, tools, and wax candles hung from nails near the front door, and a thin veneer of honey lay across everything. The soles of my shoes stuck slightly as I walked.

August led us to a tiny corner room in the back with a sink, a full-length mirror, one curtainless window, and two wooden cots made up with clean white sheets. I placed my bag on the first cot.

“May and I sleep out here sometimes when we’re harvesting honey round the clock,” August said. “It can get hot, so you’ll need to turn the fan on.”

Rosaleen reached up to where it sat on a shelf along the back wall and flipped the switch, causing cobwebs to blow off the blades and fly all over the room. She had to pick them off her cheekbones.

“You need dry clothes,” August told her.

“I’ll air-dry,” Rosaleen said, and she stretched out on the cot, making the legs on it bow.

“You’ll have to come into the house to use the bathroom,” August said. “We don’t lock the doors, so just come on in.”

Rosaleen’s eyes were closed. She had already drifted off and was making little puff noises with her mouth.

August lowered her voice. “So she fell down the steps?”

“Yes, ma’am, she went down headfirst. Caught her foot in the rug at the top of the stairs, the one my mother hooked herself.”

The secret of a good lie is don’t overly explain, and throw in one good detail.

“Well, Miss Williams, you can start work tomorrow,” she said. I stood there wondering who she was talking to, who was Miss Williams, when I remembered I was Lily Williams now. That’s the other secret to lying—you have to keep your stories straight.

“Zach will be away for a week,” she was saying. “His family has gone down to Pawley’s Island to visit his mama’s sister.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what will I be doing?”

“You’ll work with Zach and me, making the honey, doing whatever needs doing. Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”

We walked back to the large room with all the machines. She led me to a column of white boxes stacked one on top of the other. “These are called supers,” she said, setting one on the floor in front of me and removing the lid.

From the outside it looked like a regular old drawer pulled out of the dresser, but inside it were frames of honeycomb hung in a neat row. Each frame was filled with honey and sealed over with beeswax.

She pointed her finger. “That’s the uncapper over there, where we take the wax off the comb. Then it goes through the wax melter over here.”

I followed her, stepping over bits and pieces of honeycomb, which is what they had instead of dust bunnies. She stopped at the big metal tank in the center of the room.

“This is the spinner,” she said, patting the side like it was a good dog. “Go on up there and look in.”

I climbed up the two-step ladder and peered over the edge, while August flipped a switch and an old motor on the floor sputtered and cranked. The spinner started slowly, gaining speed like the cotton-candy machine at the fair, until it was sending heavenly smells into the atmosphere.

“It separates out the honey,” she said. “Takes out the bad stuff, leaves in the good. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.”

I looked back at her, and she was staring at me with her ginger-cake eyes. Was I paranoid to think that when she’d said human beings, what she really meant was me?

She turned off the motor, and the humming stopped with a series of ticking sounds. Bending over the brown tube leading from the spinner, she said, “From here it goes into the baffle tank, then over to the warming pan, and finally into the settling tank. That’s the honey gate, where we fill the buckets. You’ll get the hang of it.”

I doubted it. I’d never seen such a complex situation in my life.

“Well, I imagine you’ll want to rest up like Rosaleen. Supper is at six. You like sweet-potato biscuits? That’s May’s specialty.”

When she left, I lay on the empty cot while rain crashed on the tin roof. I felt like I’d been traveling for weeks, like I’d been dodging lions and tigers on a safari through the jungle, trying to get to the Lost Diamond City buried in the Congo, which happened to be the theme of the last matinee I’d seen in Sylvan before leaving. I felt that somehow I belonged here, I really did, but I could have been in the Congo for how unfamiliar it felt. Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets—it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me.

T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

When Rosaleen woke from her nap, before she had a chance to raise her head off the pillow, I said, “Do you like it here?”

“I guess I do,” she said, working to get herself to a sitting position. “So far.”

“Well, I like it, too,” I said. “So I don’t want you saying anything to mess it up, okay?”

She crossed her arms over her belly and frowned. “Like what?”

“Don’t say anything about the black Mary picture I got in my bag, okay? And don’t mention my mother.”

She reached up and started twisting some of her loose braids back together. “Now, how come you wanna keep that a secret?”

I hadn’t had time to sort out my reasons. I wanted to say, Because I just want to be normal for a little while—not a refugee girl looking for her mother, but a regular girl paying a summer visit to Tiburon, South Carolina. I want time to win August over, so she won’t send me back when she finds out what I’ve done. And those things were true, but even as they crossed my mind, I knew they didn’t completely explain why talking to August about my mother made me so uneasy.

I went over and began helping Rosaleen with her braids. My hands, I noticed, were shaking a little. “Just tell me you aren’t gonna say anything,” I said.

“It’s your secret,” she said. “You do what you want with it.”

 

The next morning I woke early and walked outside. The rain had stopped and the sun glowed behind a bank of clouds.

Pinewoods stretched beyond the honey house in every direction. I could make out about fourteen beehives tucked under the trees in the distance, the tops of them postage stamps of white shine.

The night before, during dinner, August had said she owned twenty-eight acres left to her by her granddaddy. A girl could get lost on twenty-eight acres in a little town like this. She could open a trapdoor and disappear.

Light spilled through a crack in a red-rimmed cloud, and I walked toward it along a path that led from the honey house into the woods. I passed a child’s wagon loaded with garden tools. It rested beside a plot growing tomatoes tied to wooden stakes with pieces of nylon hose. Mixed in with them were orange zinnias and lavender gladiolus that dipped toward the ground.

The sisters loved birds, I could see. There was a concrete birdbath and tons of feeders—hollowed-out gourds and rows of big pinecones sitting everywhere, each one smeared with peanut butter.

Where the grass gave way to the woods, I found a stone wall crudely cemented together, not even knee high but nearly fifty yards long. It curved on around the property and abruptly stopped. It didn’t seem to have any purpose to it. Then I noticed tiny pieces of folded-up paper stuck in the crevices around the stones. I walked the length of the fence, and it was the same all the way, hundreds of these bits of paper.

I pulled one out and opened it, but the writing was too blurred from rain to make out. I dug out another one. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead.

I folded it and put it back, feeling like I’d done something wrong.

Stepping over the wall, I moved into the trees, picking my way through little ferns with their blue-green feathers, careful not to tear the designs the spiders had worked so hard on all morning. It was like me and Rosaleen really had discovered the Lost Diamond City.

As I walked, I began to hear the sound of running water. It’s impossible to hear that sound and not go searching for the source. I pushed deeper into the woods. The growth turned thick, and sticker bushes snagged my legs, but I found it—a little river, not much bigger than the creek where Rosaleen and I had bathed. I watched the currents meander, the lazy ripples that once in a while broke along the surface.

Taking off my shoes, I waded in. The bottom turned mushy, squishing up through my toes. A turtle plopped off a rock into the water right in front of me, nearly scaring the Lord Jesus out of me. There was no telling what other invisible creatures I was out here socializing with—snakes, frogs, fish, a whole river world of biting bugs, and I could have cared less.

When I put on my shoes and headed back, the light poured down in shafts, and I wanted it to always be like this—no T. Ray, no Mr. Gaston, nobody wanting to beat Rosaleen senseless. Just the rain-cleaned woods and the rising light.

 

 

Let’s imagine for a moment that we are tiny enough to follow a bee into a hive. Usually the first thing we would have to get used to is the darkness…

—Exploring the World of Social Insects