The Secret Life of Bees: Honey, Mary and Unlikely Community

🐝 It's another bee book! join us for a fantastic discussion about a truly wonderful book, in which we explore the journey of a 14 year old girl escaping an abusive home and running away from her past. Can God be a mother? How does Mary fit into spirituality? How does the Civil Rights movement echo in today’s world? Join us for this and more in today's episode. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts! 

🎧Connect with us! 

Discord: discord.gg/WwzWW7FS

Instagram: @theliterarylamppost

Youtube: The Literary Lamppost

Music by Josh Ibbott
soundcloud.com/doplas

Email: Josh@doplas-music.com

Transcript

 Hi, and welcome to the Literary Lamppost Podcast, where we analyze books and see what we can learn from them. I'm Caitlin. I'm a math grad student, but I love English and I love analyzing literature. And 

I'm Ashley, an assistant editor for a magazine and a writer. 

Today we are talking about one of my favorite books from high school.

It's called The Secret Life of Bees. It was written by Sue Monk Kidd, and published in 2001. And I, like I said, I loved this book in high school. I had a really rough year in year 11, and this book was the one that I read the summer after that. I read it probably three times in that one summer. It was incredibly healing after a really painful year and actually inspired me to write my own book, which I never did because I suck at creative writing, but I spent a fair bit of time.

Analyzing this book and taking it apart and looking at the way that it was structured, and I was gonna write my own book about this, but yeah, that never happened. Anyway, just a brief trigger warning before we get started. In this episode, we are going to be discussing the suicide of one of the characters.

We are not going to be graphic about it, it's just going to be discussing it in context of one of the themes, but just so that you're aware of that before we're going in. 

So a Secret Life of Bees is a coming of age story set in the 1960s during the Civil rights movement and the surrounding unrest, and it's actually reflective of kids' own childhood and memories.

Kids says that she grew up in the south in a small town where everyone was friends, everyone. Knew each other really well, and it was really safe. But at the same time, there was all this racial tension and all the segregation, and there was actually quite an ugly side to this idyllic small town life. And she wanted this book to reflect that.

Mm. And so we are going to be talking a bit about the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but we're going to be talking about spirituality, specifically Mary, and thinking of God as a mother. And we are going to be talking about dealing with the world's grief, but. Before we do that, let's get into a bit of a book summary.

So the story is set in 1964 in a town in South Carolina called Sylvan. Where 14-year-old Lily Owens lives with her abusive father, t Ray and her black caretaker Rosaline, who acts as a mother figure to her. And Lily is haunted by this memory that she has of her mother's death, which she feels responsible for.

She remembers a fight between her parents. She remembers picking up a gun, trying to help her mother, and she remembers the explosion for most of the book. It's not confirmed that she was responsible for her mother's death, but this not knowing and the guilt of it all really affects her and is constantly in the back of her mind and, yeah.

A major trauma point that she has to get over. 

So Rosalyn is arrested while going to try to register to vote due to an altercation with some of the townsmen, and she is brutally beaten. Lily helps her escape from the hospital afterwards and decides to run away with her. The two of them travel to Tiburon, South Carolina, which is a town that was connected to Lily's mother somehow.

Uh, Lily found in the attic a picture of a black Madonna, so a painting of Mary portrayed as a black woman. And on the back of it is written Tiburon, South Carolina. In Tiburon, they find a honey J in a store with the same black Madonna on it and they trace it back to the place where the honey is made.

And there they meet the Boatright sisters June, August, and May, who run a beekeeping farm and keep a statue of the black Madonna called Our Lady of Chains. So 

Lily lies at first about her background, but gradually becomes part of the Boatright household, learning about bees, honey, and the sister's unique spiritual practices.

Lily also develops a friendship with Zach, a young black man who works with the honey and the bees who aspires to be a lawyer. 

This friendship with Zach highlights to Lily both the aspirations that black people have and the challenges that they face during this time of the civil rights movement and integration.

Now, before we get into this, we just want to say we will be using the language that the book uses. They describe black people as Negroes, and this is not appropriate language to use, but this is the language that was used in the sixties. So when we are reading quotes from the book, we will use the language that the book uses, but we don't condone using this type of language.

The story is set around the time of integration where schools and even churches were still segregated. And Lily says of her congregation that every time a rumor got. Going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning. The deacons stood locked, armed across the church steps to turn them away.

We loved them in the Lord, brother Gerald said, but they had their own places. 

It's interesting how there were these limits put on loving others in the Lord. 

Yeah. I feel like we see that a fair bit today. Mm-hmm. There's like, there's always reasons why, oh, I'm still loving my neighbor. They just don't belong here, kind of thing.

Like the whole saying you love them in the Lord is a cover for the non loving actions. That you take towards them? Oh, I love them as a Christian and I'll pray for them, but they don't belong here. So they can be treated in all these unloving ways and I support their treatment in these unloving ways. Oh.

But I still love them in the Lord. You know what I mean? Like it kind of covers for it. Yeah. 

It's like a disguise of them being pious and good Christians. 

It's like using words of lovingness to gloss over. The unloving. It's like people saying, oh, well I'm not racist, but, and then proceeding to say something really racist, you know?

Mm-hmm. And so I think it's quite interesting that even in a church where you know you're supposed to love others, there's this sense of, oh yeah, we love them in the Lord, but they have their own place. They don't belong here. And if they try to belong with us, we are not gonna treat them. Anyway, Rosaline is arrested while going to put her name down to vote.

Up until 1965, the right to vote was not protected or enforced for black people in any sort of meaningful way. There were some places where black men could vote, but effectively black women couldn't vote at all until 1965. 

And as she's going, she was harassed and heckled by this group of men. And in response, she has this.

Little jug that she carries around her 'cause she chews tobacco and then she spits her tobacco juice into the jug. And so she took her jug and she wrote her name in cursive on the ground, getting it on the men's shoes, and they beat her up with a metal flashlight and she's taken to jail where she's beaten again while the jailer looks the other way.

And she ends up 

in the hospital. And now obviously this was very illegal, but it did happen when people chose not to follow the law because of, you know, maybe their own internal biases. It was even like policemen and the jailers, like they looked the other way because. They didn't have this sense of it being wrong.

Yeah. And so as a result, they didn't feel like they needed to follow or enforce the rule. Yeah. And obviously this is fiction, but incidents like this were strongly reflected in reality of the time. 

And the story's changed in some significant ways due to violent incidents surrounding integration, which was strongly opposed in the South.

And what's really sad is it feels like that we've, it would be nice to think that we had moved past all of this, but currently. There are starting to be talks of going back there in the us. Some of the politicians who are currently in power are talking about leaving interracial marriage to the states, which of course means it'll end up being for debate, which gives an opening to those who think it should be overturned.

I mean, think about some of the other things that were quote unquote, left to the states. They, they just, those things disappeared. 

Yeah. And so 

once things are left to the states that, that gives that opening for it to be challenged and overturned. So I would not be surprised if we started seeing, pushing for that, which is honestly tragic.

Yeah. It's, it's pretty scary seeing some of the rights that, you know, people fought for and pushed for and eventually got like being lost. 

Yeah, I actually find it quite heartbreaking 'cause I thought as humanity we were better than this. Yeah. It's heartbreaking to see this sense of equality of people.

Mm-hmm. To be able to marry who they want and love who they want. This should go without saying, but people should be allowed to be with the people that they love. You know, but the good news is that it's not inevitable, especially to those of us who care about it. And one way that we can make sure that it doesn't happen is to challenge our own biases and prejudices and work towards moving beyond them.

Yeah, Lily is a really good example of that. She comes with the boat rides with very little knowledge about the black community as someone of her age and position would be in her time. And she's very honest with herself about her own biases, but you know, she ultimately overcomes a lot of them through her experience 

with people.

Lily says that her father, t Ray, did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts. I thought that 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. Mm. I think that, I think that the. Best thing about Lily is that she's actually able to be honest with herself and confront these things with herself because that's the way to get rid of them. Being able to confront those ugly parts of yourself and say, no, I actually want to be better than this.

Yeah. Um, at another point when she's thinking these things through is when she first, Zach, she's shocked at the fact that he's handsome. Um, she says that she used to laugh at jokes, at black people's appearances in order to fit in at school. It never occurred to her that someone black 

could be handsome.

So Lily's understanding of black people is significantly challenged by becoming family with black people. She realizes the way in which she didn't see them as fully equal to herself, and that was partially because of the environment that she had been in. And she encounters one of the sisters, mistrusting her because she's white and she's indignant about this.

She's like, you don't even know me. And then she realizes that that's the same thing that she's been doing to them. Another time something like this comes up is when Lily and Zach are having a conversation about Zach's future. And Zach expresses anxiety that he won't be able to achieve his dream of being a lawyer.

And Lily says, oh, you could just be a football player. And Zach gets a little upset at her saying, well, why is it that white people never think that black people can be anything other than sports players? And Lily says. Oh, I've never heard of a black lawyer. You have to hear about something before you can imagine it.

And Zach just responds with you gotta imagine what's never been. And I just, I love that. Yeah. I think that that's a really good way of thinking about it. You know, even if the world has these awful elements, you have to imagine a better world in order to be able to move towards it. I I just love that.

Yeah. And from that point on, she starts imagining him as a lawyer and fully believing that he can do it. I think sometimes when we are confronting our own biases, something that can get in the way is guilt, and I think it's important to remember that when it comes to conversations around race, guilt is a very useless emotion and honestly, a very bad excuse and a bad motivator for making decisions.

I think it's really important to note that we do all have prejudices. We all have internal biases in many categories of the life, and we can't change that fact. We are not perfect, but we can gear our thoughts and actions and judge people. For who they are and not what group they belong to. And you can do this by staying educated with current events and learning about other cultures that you interact with.

This is one of the reasons why we emphasize reading books by and about people who are different than you because it kind of opens you up to. Whole new worldviews, and I think it's so important to be able to learn how to see the world from different people's perspectives and acknowledge some of the challenges that other people face, which you might never have to.

Speaking of different, the spirituality in this book is a bit different. According to the sisters August, June, and May, it's kind of their own form of Catholicism. They have a wooden figure of Mary. In their living room passed down through generations with a story, and the story goes something like this.

Back in the times of slaves, when the people cried out for deliverance, a man found a wooden figure washed up on the bank of the river. The book says her body was growing out of a block of wood. A black woman with her arm lifted out and her fist balled up. The people believed that she'd been sent by God and one old woman proclaimed her to be Mary, the mother of God.

And the book says, our lady filled their hearts with fearlessness and whisper to them plans of escape. The bold ones fled finding their way north. And those who didn't lived with a raised fist in their hearts, she was taken by their master multiple times and chained, but she always went back to the people, thus came the name Our Lady of Chains.

And this figure of 

Mary who was carved out of really dark colored wood felt like a picture of God that understood them. As 

they said, when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives. That what's divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who 

looks like them.

And you know, it might be a confronting thought to someone who is white that God could actually look like a black woman, but there's no reason why God couldn't, as God is a God for all people and has. Ways of connecting with all people. It actually kind of highlights how used to a picture of a white God we are when we see representations of God and classical art that is portrayed as a white man, but we don't blink an eye at that.

But if God was portrayed as a black woman in those contexts, we might find that. A little bit confronting and a little bit challenging. In his book, born A Crime, Trevor Noah tells about how he spoke English a lot better than the others in his community, and as a result, he's asked to pray more because prayers in English work better because Jesus was white, which you know, he wasn't.

But that was the picture that they had received. 

And now the Black Madonna is very well known across the world. Though not so much well known in the American South, especially where most people thought Catholics were evil and God was white, 

according to Brother Gerald, hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics.

It's crazy to me that it is so incredibly easy to start hating others, even within a religion that's supposed to be about loving others. Mm-hmm. So there's this whole sense of, you know, oh, we love others, but black people aren't allowed in our church, and Catholics are all going to help. There's something.

I feel like if you're a Christian, it feels like, well, obviously I love others, but that sense about yourself can mask growing hatred underneath it, and that's just something to be careful about. Back 

to the Black Madonna Bible characters were not white. They would've been Middle Eastern. That's fairly well known now.

But by making Jesus white and fitting him into the very specific worldview and proclaiming that he embodied certain ideals, excluded 

a whole lot of people, and I think that that happened because of the way that Christianity got filtered through. Northern Europe, 

I think it was made way worse through colonization, which a large part of it, other than the exploitation of resources was the desire to christianize other cultures.

And the way that missionaries went about it was. Very damaging and devastating, you know, forcing people to give up not only their beliefs, but their identities, their families and culture, so that the next generation would be Christian. 

And now we've mentioned before that we are Christians, we believe in Christianity, and we believe that sharing Christianity can be a good thing.

But it really comes down to how that's done. And if it's done in a damaging way, it can cause a lot more damage than. Anything good that can come out of it. 

The similar dynamic is happening in this story in the secret life of bees. The slaves worshiping Mary was kind of a way to take back their identity, right?

It was a way for them to stand up for themselves to not bow down and to not consider themselves less, and even down the generations. It was the way for the Boatright sisters and their little community of black women to. Connect with each other and the divine. But you know, the sisters don't exclude Lily from this, despite her skin color.

August tells Lily, when you are unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are. And August also drives home the idea that Mary helps us to love. And she says, when you get down to it, that's the only purpose.

Grand enough for a human life, not just to love, but to persist in love. 

There are various perspectives about Mary across the different. Denominations of Christianity, different perspectives of who she was and who she is in relation to God. Um, but I think that what's really important is that these things that were attributed to Mary are genuine characteristics of God.

And I think that they should be emphasized as celebrated. Now, we haven't talked about the bees much yet. Um, if you listen to our last episode on the murmur of Bees, you'll remember how significant of a theme that they were. And they're less significant here in a sense. There's no magical realism, but they still play a part in the storyline, and we're very closely tied to the character's lives and beliefs.

August teaches Lily how to take care of the bees and how each hive needs a queen, and she calls the queen, the mother of thousands. And Lily later goes on to a tribute, this title to Mary. I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother. She says, you are the mother of thousands. 

I think that this book really highlights an interesting dynamic in Christianity where Christianity has significantly been shaped by patriarchy.

Biblically. There's a really good case to be made that God doesn't have a gender embodying, um, masculine and feminine traits. And as such, I find it really sad that there's such a strong masculine emphasis on God. When I first read this book, I realized just how much. Of a need there is within faith for a divine feminine presence, um, rather than just the divine masculine presence that.

We've grown up with in Christianity. And while I don't see myself venerating or worshiping Mary, I can see why others do. And I think that this book helped me to envision God as a feminine rather than just a masculine. And you know, Christians believe humans are made in the image of God, so God would reflect any gender.

There's nothing wrong with seeing and seeking God as a mother. I think that that's a really healthy and positive thing to do. 

I think that idea might even help a lot of people who I know struggle to see a God as a father because they, their concept of a father has not been very good. Either their father has been emotionally absent or distant or, you know, not present at all or abusive, and they.

Totally reject the idea of God because they don't understand what a loving father is. 

I think that there's a lot within traditional religion and spirituality that could use a good challenge and refining, and I think that this, the influence of patriarchy on Christianity is a really good place to start having a heavenly mother.

I think especially for Lily who doesn't have a mother. 

And so much of her life circles around this trauma of losing her mother when she has had an abusive 

father. That's true actually. She does, and up until this point, her only concept of God has been strongly associated with her father. And so this lack of a mother, the fact that this idea of Mary, this presence of Mary can fill that role for her, has allowed her to connect with spirituality in a way that she didn't before.

And it helped her cope with some of the grief and trauma that she experienced. Dealing with grief 

is a theme that this book explores through Lily. Yes, but then also through the youngest Boatwright sister, whose name is May now, may used to be a twin. Her twin's name was April, and April died by suicide when she was only 15.

Now the two were incredibly close as August explained to Lily. The two of them were like one soul sharing two bodies. If April got a toothache, Mae's gum would plump up red and swollen just like April's. Only one time did our father use a belt strap on April, and I swear to you, the welts rose on May's legs too.

Those two had no separation between 

them. So when April died, August said, it was like the world itself became Mae's twin sister. It was 

sort of like she wasn't able to distinguish. The pain happening to her and the pain happening to other people. Even if there were strangers on the tv, she just felt everything so keenly.

Now, she had a rock wall out the back of the house that she'd been building for 10 years, and she would write things that upset her. Either someone in the family, like her sister June, refusing to marry her boyfriend or news on the television about the Civil Rights movement. She'd write it all on a piece of paper and then roll it up and shove it in the cracks in the wall.

And she called her her wailing wall after the Jewish wailing wall, which is a real wall where Jewish people go to write their grief on paper and put it in the cracks. And sometimes May's sister would try and shelter her from something that had happened, and they were really protective and supportive, but.

It. At the end of the day, they couldn't stop me from ending her own life. They tried to stop the news of a close friend of theirs being jailed, getting to her, but she found out and went out to the river and drowned herself. She left a note behind. I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now.

It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up. And you know, 

while I don't. Struggle with those particular mental health challenges. I do tend to feel a lot of the pain and grief in the world quite strongly, and I kind of resonate with that feeling of. I want to lay it down and stop feeling that.

So I have some empathy for me in this regard. Like I've had thoughts of, oh, one day I'll get to die and the world will no longer be my problem. Yeah. 

Our world is very connected in a way that it never used to be. People used to live in their little villages, in their little bubbles with little to no 

knowledge of the outside world.

Once the industrial revolution kicked in, the world became a lot more connected with telegrams and news from overseas, et cetera. But in the last 20 years, we've taken another huge leap with social media and we see awful suffering taking place in short form content as we scroll. There's a lot of entertaining or educational videos, but often we see raw, unfiltered videos of war and violence and suffering, and I actually find it really jarring.

One moment you're seeing an ad for lip gloss, and the next you see the image of a starving child or an area that has been bombed. It's it's emotional whiplash. It really is. 

It's sometimes really difficult to be on social media, but hear me out. It's important to be informed. In this very global and connected world, staying informed helps us make better choices in our daily lives that affect other people's lives overseas.

For example, if you are aware of sweatshops and child labor, you'll probably be less likely to invest in fast fashion. If you're aware about the plastic in the ocean, you'll probably try and cut down your own plastic. Intake is intake the right word? Plastic. Use your plastic use. If you are aware about a war happening overseas, you can hold your own government accountable for supporting it with weaponry.

That said, it can be really difficult to handle bad news day after day. This is strange balance you have to find between staying informed and. Staying sane, protecting your own mental health? Yeah. I find that I feel 

guilty sometimes that my own life is going well and I'm not experiencing some of those things, so I feel like I need to know all about what's happening everywhere.

But I've learned that my mental health, suffering from absorbing so much of other people's pain is not. Going to help them, but completely ignoring everything isn't really a great option either, unless your mental health is really bad because your voice can make a difference, and silence leads to no change at all.

So there are a few ways I've thought to help with this balance between staying informed and protecting yourself. Number one. Get involved. It kind of counteracts this passive absorption of news that's so easy to fall into, just consuming bad news and not doing anything, which I think is the worst space to be in.

I found that doing something, however small, you know, talking to people, donating, recycling, signing petitions can help you stay more hopeful. And I think that hope is an important feeling when we need to protect and nurture because a lot of people, especially in our generation, don't have much hope. 

And in order to actually work towards a better world, you actually have to have hope that it can exist first.

Like Zach said to Lily, you have to imagine things that don't exist in order to make them happen. Mm, yeah, exactly. So having hope and holding onto hope and not giving into this idea of, oh, all is lost, is really, really important. Not just for your own mental health, but for the fate of the world. 

Yeah, exactly.

And number two, consider how you're consuming news because it really makes a difference. Are you scrolling or are you slow reading articles and commentaries at a designated time each day and then putting it aside. I do think both have a place, to be honest, as long as we're careful about our sources, especially from social media.

But social media is the one that is going to be more detrimental to mental health than just reading news. And 

we say this on this podcast, but this is actually advice that I struggle to implement into my own life. I know that. Limiting my news intake and limiting my scrolling my doom. Scrolling is really important, but it's also really hard to maintain.

Yeah, yeah. So don't be too hard on yourself because we are giving this advice not only to you, but also to ourselves. Yeah. We 

struggle too. And you know, this is obviously such a first world problem, but we live in the first, but we live in a first world and it is a real problem and it's something that needs to be talked about.

And at the end of the day, most people are not. Like, may we can separate other people's suffering from our own. But she eventually was overwhelmed by it all. And in our current world dynamics, we too can be very easily overwhelmed. So protect your mental health people make healthy choices about your social media consumption.

Stay informed and try and get involved. The 

Secret Life of Bees is such an incredible book. It is gripping, it is heartwarming, it is challenging, and it's a book that you'll definitely want to come back to multiple times as we have. And there's so much in this book that is just as relevant today as it was in the 1960s where this book is set.

So highly encourage you to go and read this amazing book. A hundred 

percent. And I just wanna end with a quote. The best advice I think that August Boatwright gives to Lily In this book, she says, there is nothing perfect. There is only life. 

 📍 And on that note, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Literary Lamppost.

Join us on Instagram and share your thoughts with us. We'd love to hear what you think. 

Also 

share 

this podcast with someone you think would enjoy it and stay tuned for our next episode in which we will be talking about the help, 

which is not be themed, but the cover is yellow so it fits. 

Yeah. Make sure to follow us on Instagram and YouTube at the literary lamppost, as well as subscribing on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform to make sure that you don't miss any of our new episodes.

Thanks for listening and see you next time.  This podcast includes brief excerpts from literary works for the purpose of commentary, criticism, and analysis, which we believe constitutes fair use under copyright law. Our theme music was created by Joshua iBot. My brother-in-law for exclusive, exclusive, exclusive use by the Literary Lamppost podcast.

Thanks guys. 





Boy.