Free The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

coincidence.’
    She didn’t answer, so I said louder, ‘Rosaleen? Don’t you think so?’
    ‘I don’t know what I think,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t want you getting your hopes up too much, is all.’
    She reached over and touched my cheek.
    ‘Oh, Lily, what have we gone and done?’
    Tiburon was a place like Sylvan, minus the peaches. In front of the domed courthouse someone had stuck a Confederate flag in the mouth of their public cannon. South Carolina was Dixie first, America second. You could not get the pride of Fort Sumter out of us if you tried. Strolling down Main Street, we moved through long blue shadows cast from the two-story buildings that ran the length of the street. At a drugstore, I peered through the plate glass at a soda fountain with chrome trim, where they sold cherry Cokes and banana splits, thinking that soon it would not be just for white people anymore. We walked past Worth Insurance Agency, Tiburon County Rural Electric office, and the Amen Dollar Store, which had Hula Hoops, swim goggles, and boxes of sparklers in the window with SUSMER FN spray-painted across the glass. A few places, like the Farmers Trust Bank, had GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT signs in their windows, sometimes with a bumper sticker across the bottom saying AFFIRMATION VIETNAM. At the Tiburon post office I left Rosaleen on the sidewalk and stepped inside to where the post office boxes and the Sunday newspapers were kept. As far as I could tell, there were no wanted posters in there of me and Rosaleen, and the front-page headline in the Columbia paper was about Castro’s sister spying for the CIA and not a word about a white girl breaking a Negro woman out of jail in Sylvan. I dropped a dime into the slot and took one of the papers, wondering if the story was inside somewhere. Rosaleen and I squatted on the ground in an alley and spread out the paper, opening every page. It was full of Malcolm X, Saigon, the Beatles, tennis at Wimbledon, and a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, that closed down rather than accept Negro guests, but nothing about me and Rosaleen. Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

Chapter Four
    H oneybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers. The workers cooperate in the food-gathering, nest-building and rearing the offspring. Males are reared only at the times of year when their presence is required.
    —Bees of the World
    T he woman moved along a row of white boxes that bordered 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