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 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Once she is alone in the honey house, Lily can’t sleep. In her anger and sadness, Lily smashes every bottle of honey until she, the honey house, the Black Mary statue are covered in honey and glass. Lily eventually falls asleep on the floor, where Rosaleen finds her the next morning covered in honey and blood from where glass has cut her hand. While Rosaleen is giving her a bath, Lily tells Rosaleen about her conversation with August, and Rosaleen is saddened, but not completely surprised, that Lily’s mother did in fact leave her. Lily is upset with Rosaleen for not telling her what she knew or what she heard, and Rosaleen responds that the last thing she would ever want to do is hurt Lily with the truth like that. Rosaleen and Lily clean the honey house together and get all of the honey off of Our Lady. The Daughters show up for the second day of the Mary festivities, during which they cover Mary in honey until her chains slide right off her. August explains to Lily that honey is a preservative and is actually good for the statue—that honey is as strong as it is sweet.
August gives Lily a box of her mother’s belongings that she left behind 10 years ago. Lily finds her hairbrush, a pin, and a book of poetry in the box. August also gives her a small, framed photo of her mother and her when she was a baby. They both look happy, and Lily feels a moment of love.
Chapter 14 Summary
August gives Lily the space and time that she needs to grieve and doesn’t ask her to help with the bees or do any chores. Lily spends this time by herself by the river and contemplates how to begin to let go of the hurt she has held on to so strongly over the years. Everyone in the house gives Lily space and time, including Zach when he comes to work. Lily wonders how much time she has before August has to do something about the information Lily has given her. While Lily remains in her grief frozen in time, the house continues on. June and August start preparing for June’s wedding, Rosaleen buys a new dress and goes into town to register to vote, and Zach enrolls in the white high school for the upcoming school year.
Once Lily starts coming around the house again, August asks her to come help with the bees and shows Lily a hive that is missing its queen. August tells Lily that the whole hive will die if she doesn’t get a replacement queen. That same afternoon, while Lily is writing in the notebook that Zach gave her, T. Ray shows up at the house in a blind rage and demands that Lily get in the car and come home with him. When Lily refuses to leave with him, they start fighting, and Lily reveals that this is where her mother went when she ran away. All of T. Ray’s suppressed grief and anger come to the surface when he sees Lily wearing the pin he gave her mother. T. Ray calls Lily “Deborah” and tries to forcibly get her to leave. August, June, and Rosaleen come back to the house at the same time that the Daughters show up, and August convinces T. Ray to let Lily stay with her. After some arguing, T. Ray concedes. Rosaleen and Lily stay with August, and Lily moves into June’s room after she moves in with Neil. Lily becomes friends with Mr. Clayton’s daughter, Becca, and Lily, Becca, and Zach spend every day of high school together. Lily keeps her mother’s things on display at August’s house, and when Becca asks her about them, Lily tells her the story of her mother.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
Lily finds that her extreme grief over knowing the truth about what happened with her mother is different from the grief she held for her before. She acknowledges that “everything seemed emptied out— the feelings I’d had for her, the things I’d believed, all those stories about her I’d lived off of like they were food and water and air” (260). While Lily’s fantasies about her mother are not completely accurate, neither are her worst fears about her. In this first stage of grief, Lily can’t imagine ever feeling better about what she has just discovered, but this “emptying out” is actually making room for new stories to live by, stories in which neither Lily nor her mother are villains.
Lily is given the same amount of time to grieve the truth of her mother as August and June took to grieve May. August gives Lily this time and space because she realizes that the death of a story, whether real or imagined, can cause a death of the self. Because Lily has made the story of her mother her whole identity, she feels lost about who she is shortly after her conversation with August. She sees that knowing the truth means she’s been given an opportunity to move through and on from her hurt, but she doesn’t know who she is without these sorrows.
Rosaleen’s decision to attempt to register to vote again is symbolic of what all of these characters are trying, in their own way, to accomplish: to know and see life’s possible heartbreak and keep living anyway.
Lily discovers that the voice that has been guiding her is the voice of the divine, the mother that will always be with and within her. With this knowledge, Lily is finally able to see past T. Ray’s anger to his grief and fear. This perspective enables her to let go of him, and in turn he is able to let go of her.
Lily’s mother’s objects on display in August’s house are indicative of both the power of remembering and Lily’s ability to see her mother’s things not as sacred objects that need to be preserved but as reminders that her mother was alive.
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By Sue Monk Kidd
