The Secret Life of Bees: Chapters 4–7

Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers.

I knocked on the door while she muttered a slew of words under her breath: Give me strength ... Baby Jesus ... Lost our feeble minds.

She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one.

May’s grin dissolved, and out of nowhere she started humming “Oh! Susanna” like her life depended on it.

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

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.

That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

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.

Then I noticed tiny pieces of folded-up paper stuck in the crevices around the stones.

I watched the currents meander, the lazy ripples that once in a while broke along the surface.

“This ain’t charity,” said Rosaleen when August spread them across the kitchen table.

We took it with every meal to calm the mind, give us stamina, and prevent fatal disease.

August said honey was the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses.

I mean she was naïve and unassuming, a grown-up and a child at the same time, plus she was a touch crazy.

A few times she cried so bad, ranting and tearing her hair, that Rosaleen had to come get August from the honey house.

She played music for dying people, going to their homes and even to the hospital to serenade them into the next life.

This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color.

Jesus had righteous indignation when he turned over the tables in the temple and drove out the thieving moneychangers.

I walked back toward the honey house, feeling ashamed that August had seen through my hoax but relieved, too, that she wasn’t planning on calling the police or sending me back—yet.

It was some kind of Catholic saying, but when I asked August if they were Catholic, she said, “Well, yes and no. My mother was a good Catholic—she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary’s in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”

I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called “bee yard etiquette.”

She kept 48 hives strewn through the woods around the pink house, and another 280 were parceled out on various farms, in river yards and upland swamps.

The Jewish people go there to mourn. It’s a way for them to deal with their suffering.

I looked at Rosaleen, afraid this situation of jilted love might be unfortunate enough to send May into one of her episodes, but she was intent on my pancake.

I thought about explaining to her my mother’s ingenious method of ridding the house of roaches—cracker crumbs and marshmallow—but then I thought, This is June, forget it.

“Well,” she said, “back in the time of slaves, when the people were beaten down and kept like property, they prayed every day and every night for deliverance."

I could tell she had repeated those opening lines a thousand times, that she was saying them the exact way she’d heard them coming from the lips of some old woman, who’d heard them from the lips of an even older one, the way they came out like a song, with rhythms that rocked us to and fro till we had left the premises and were, ourselves, on the islands of Charleston looking for rescue.

She stayed like that for a few seconds while we sat, spellbound.

We sat in the den, where I ate supper off a tray, which was a privilege in itself.

August and Zach had already extracted most of the honey from her bee yards

He had patches of honey on his shirt, which were attracting a horde of flies and causing him to swat incessantly.

Part of Zach’s job was going around to deliver fresh supplies of honey and candles to places that sold them on consignment.

“She is only a world-famous writer who wrote three Pulitzer Prize books about the deciduous trees of South Carolina.”

She said that was because honey remnants attracted roaches.

I didn’t know if it was the emptiness, the stifling heat, or the fact it was only nine o’clock, but I couldn’t settle into sleep despite how tired I was.