The Secret Life of Bees

Lily’s father is first introduced as a villain, and he stays that way throughout most of the novel. Since readers only come to understand T. Ray through Lily’s perspective, he is cast as a fairly one-dimensional character.

The fact that Lily calls him T. Ray instead of Dad is indicative of how far they are from the typical father/daughter relationship. T. Ray is angry and abusive of Lily. He punishes her by making her kneel on grits and keeps a tight rein on her. We come to understand later that Lily is perhaps experiencing the punishment meant for her mother, Deborah, for leaving T. Ray 10 years ago.

Lily can’t comprehend how T. Ray might be acting out of his own unresolved fear and grief until the very end of the novel. T. Ray has spent Lily’s entire childhood keeping the presence of her dead mother out of their house, and while Lily sees this as a punishment of her, she finally sees that T. Ray is also trying to protect himself from memories he can’t confront. The biggest reminder of Deborah is Lily, and Lily considers that T. Ray’s grief and anger are keeping him from loving her, not because he never wanted to, but because he can’t.

Lily is able to entertain a more complicated view of T. Ray by the end of the novel because of the experiences she has had with August, June, May, Zach, and Rosaleen. Lily’s understanding of T. Ray is another signifier of her growing into adulthood—being able to view adults as the scared children they sometimes behave like.

Rosaleen is Lily’s strong, opinionated, and protective stand-in mother. When Deborah is gone for good, T. Ray pulls Rosaleen out of her work on their peach farm and asks her to be the primary caretaker of Lily. Rosaleen and Lily’s relationship is complicated: Rosaleen works for T. Ray, Rosaleen is Black, and while Rosaleen is a pillar of Lily’s daily life, Lily doesn’t know anything about Rosaleen’s life outside of it having to do with her.

Rosaleen sets the drama of the novel in play when she decides to go register to vote. When Lily hears of Rosaleen’s plan, she is fearful and asks if T. Ray knows what she’s doing. Rosaleen responds, “T. Ray don’t know nothing” (27). This loaded comment shows how Rosaleen thinks of T. Ray not just in regards to her taking the day off to register to vote, but in regards to the civil rights movement and his own home and daughter. T. Ray’s not knowing anything means that Rosaleen has to know everything.

Rosaleen steps out of her caretaking role for Lily when they arrive at the Boatwright sisters’ house, and this shift causes some initial pain for Lily. Rosaleen starts to be seen and described as a person outside of her mothering of Lily, where before Lily commented that she thought Rosaleen was “as alone in the world as me” (12). Rosaleen and Lily reconnect once Lily recognizes that her love for Rosaleen is not contingent upon what Rosaleen does for her or how she takes care of her. Lily sees Rosaleen transform in the pink house, and her decision, at the end of the novel, to finish what she started and go to register to vote is a great lesson for Lily in knowing life’s griefs and disappointments and moving forward anyway.

August is an unmarried, middle-aged Black woman who seems to see and understand everyone’s truest nature. She is the matriarch of the pink house and the mentor of the story. August is the wise and patient beekeeper of the novel. She is the leader of the Daughters of Mary and a practitioner of the divine feminine.

August knows who Lily is as soon as she shows up at the pink house, yet she chooses to approach Lily in the gentlest way possible and let Lily know that she can come to her when she’s ready. August has a gift for getting to the heart of things through her love of bees and her storytelling. She imparts wisdom to Lily without ever broaching the subject of her mother directly. August holds a belief that storytelling, whether real or imagined, holds power. She encourages those around her to live, without ever pushing them past what they can handle. When Lily asks August why she didn’t tell her that she knew who she was, August responds, “There’s a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course” (236).

August does not have a husband or any children, telling Lily that she’s always loved her freedom more than any man she’s loved. August, in not being a biological mother, can be a mother to everyone. She is the queen bee of the pink hive house, and she shows Lily that there is more than one way to live, to love, and to be a family.

June, the middle and most serious Boatwright sister, is a stoic musician who is unwelcoming to Lily on the first day she arrives. June becomes somewhat of a foil for Lily in that she forces Lily to confront her own ideas and bias about her whiteness. Lily is very troubled and at times angry by June’s dislike of her as Lily has no basis of understanding what it would be like to have someone see you only as your race.

June warms up to Lily in time and even becomes affectionate toward her. August reveals to Lily that June’s resentment of her, like her own father’s, had more to do with her mother than with Lily. August worked in Deborah’s home growing up, and June was always angry that she worked for a white woman. August explains to Lily that when June saw her, she also saw her mother, Deborah.

June’s conflict throughout the book is presented by her long-time lover, Neil. Neil has been asking June to marry him for years, but she always turns him down. June was left at the altar by the first man she loved many years ago, and this experience caused her to swear men and marriage off completely. She is in love with Neil as much as he is in love with her, and they get in multiple fights over her not wanting to marry him while Lily and Rosaleen are there. Neil recognizes June’s resistance as fear when he says during one of their big fights, “What are you so scared of?” (132). June is an example of what can happen when a person puts so much effort into protecting themselves from the pains of life that they miss out on some of its joys. June’s ultimate moment of change comes when she says yes to Neil’s marriage proposal on the first day of Mary Day.

May Boatwright is the youngest Boatwright sister and initially the most perplexing to Lily and Rosaleen. May is described as being a childlike person in an adult’s body. Lily and Rosaleen witness May’s extreme emotional reactions to bad news and watch as the sisters encourage her to take a walk to the “wall” when they hear her start humming “Oh! Susannah.” These habits, the singing and the wailing wall, are May’s way of navigating the extreme grief she has not been able to shake since her twin sister died by suicide. April, May’s twin and counterpart, experienced an upsetting moment of overt racism as a teen. She fell into a deep depression after this experience from which she never recovered. May was never the same after the death of her sister and has what August describes to Lily as an extreme sensitivity to the world: “Like the world itself became May’s twin sister” (97).

May’s character is an example of one overcome by grief, their own and others. May has no protection from the ugliness of the world and nowhere to put the burden of her heartbreak. May’s “wailing wall,” where she files away pieces of paper on which are written the tragedies she cannot bear alone, is the physical embodiment of all the loss and trauma that these characters carry.

After hearing of Zach’s arrest, May drowns herself in the river behind their house. She uses a stone from the wailing wall to hold her body under the water, a final image of the grief that finally pulls her under.