40 pages • 1 hour read
Sue Monk KiddThe Secret Life of Bees
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Lily, the book’s protagonist, mentions the summer of 1964 as the summer that the bees came and her life changed forever. Lily recounts being four years old and picking up a gun that was dropped on the floor during a fight her parents were having. She picked it up and it went off, killing her mother. Lily’s father, T. Ray, is cold and distant and often cruel to Lily. She thinks of him as so unlike a father that she calls him T. Ray. Rosaleen previously worked in T. Ray’s orchard, but after Lily’s mother dies, T. Ray pulls her from the orchard and brings her to the house, where she cares for Lily and their home. Lily calls Rosaleen her “stand-in mother.” This chapter establishes what Lily’s life has been like up until the summer of 1964 and how her identity is wrapped up in her being motherless.
The chapter ends with Lily accompanying Rosaleen as she registers to vote. This is the summer that Johnson signed the Civil Right Act into law. On the way to register, Rosaleen is harassed by some white men, and both Lily and Rosaleen are arrested after Rosaleen pours her snuff bottle on the white men’s shoes.
Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 begins in the back of the police car with Lily and Rosaleen. When Avery Gaston, the policeman who arrested the two women, lets one of the men whom Rosaleen poured snuff on hit her over the head with a flashlight, Lily realizes that the police are not going to protect Rosaleen, while they might protect her. Lily is picked up by T. Ray, who leaves Rosaleen in jail. Back at home Lily and T. Ray get into an explosive fight in which T. Ray reveals to Lily that the day her mother died she was coming back for her stuff after already having left Lily and T. Ray. Lily sees T. Ray’s story as an attempt at punishing her by convincing her that her mother never loved her and never protected her. After this fight, Lily decides to run away, but first she decides she needs to break Rosaleen out of jail. Lily sneaks into the hospital where Rosaleen is being treated for the injuries she sustained when “Shoe”—Mr. Gaston, the policeman at the jail—let the men from the confrontation come get their “apology,” which Rosaleen still refuses to fulfill.
Lily successfully sneaks Rosaleen out of the hospital, and they hitch a ride to Columbia. When they’re dropped off three miles outside of Tiburon, Rosaleen asks Lily why she wants to run away to Tiburon of all places. Lily shows Rosaleen a photo that belonged to her mother with the Black Madonna and “Tiburon, South Carolina” written on the back and explains that her mother was here before and probably still has friends nearby they can stay with. Rosaleen scoffs at this plan, and the two of them fight once Rosaleen realizes that Lily’s showing up at the hospital was not as much about freeing Rosaleen as it was about freeing herself and getting away from T. Ray. The chapter ends with Rosaleen and Lily apologizing to one another and bathing in the river.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Lily as the narrator establishes early on that the summer of 1964 was a pivotal moment in her life. The moment of Lily’s mother’s death has become the myth of Lily’s life both because it was traumatizing and because it is Lily’s only memory of her. T. Ray refuses to talk about Lily’s mother, so Lily only has the memory of her death to build a story around. This idea of having a story to live by becomes increasingly important as the book goes on and Lily is forced to reckon with the truth of that day and the story that she has told herself about it.
Lily and Rosaleen’s complex relationship is also established in these first two chapters. Rosaleen is Lily’s stand-in mother, yet according to Rosaleen, Lily treats her “like you’re my keeper” (53). Lily is forced to deal with her own unexplored racist thinking once she arrives at the Boatwright sisters’, but for now Lily thinks she knows all about Black people because she knows one Black person, Rosaleen. The troubling of these ideas is part of Lily’s growth in this novel.
While Lily has not been sheltered from the grief and pain of life, there are some things that she is relatively naive to. Her understanding broadens as soon as she and Rosaleen are arrested and she witnesses what the policemen have let the white men from the card game do to Rosaleen. When Lily picks up Rosaleen from the hospital, she also sees how the white section of the hospital is so much nicer, newer, and cooler than the section for Black people. One of the tensions that Rosaleen’s arrest brings up for Lily is her inability to understand why someone would put themselves in the line of danger. Lily doesn’t understand why Rosaleen won’t just apologize to the white men when she thinks, “Why couldn’t you just apologize? Then maybe Franklin Posey would let you off with just a beating. All she’d done is guarantee they’d come back” (46). Lily doesn’t yet understand that sometimes keeping oneself safe is not the most vital goal.
The theme of refusing to know or see the truth also arises in these first two chapters. Lily asks T. Ray if he thinks Franklin Posey would really kill Rosaleen, and when T. Ray says yes, Lily thinks to herself, “hadn’t I known this inside before T. Ray ever said it?” (38). When T. Ray reveals to Lily that her mother was not the woman Lily is imagining, and in fact she left her and was only back the day she died to get her things, Lily decides this story is something she cannot accept. Lily worries that what T. Ray is telling her is true, so she decides that he must be lying to her to punish her. The truth, she decides, “would sink me forever” (40).
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