I said, Madam,
Can it be
You trying to make a
Pack-horse out of me?
She opened her mouth
She cried, Oh, no!
You know, Alberta,
I love you so!
–Langston Hughes, “Madam and Her Madam,”
First of all, I’m sorry I’ve been such a deadbeat blogger lately. And thanks to Jill and Zuzu for covering Bigotgate and Boobiegate while I was sleeping it off. I think I’ve been experiencing a little delayed post-op malaise. I’ve been tired and preoccupied lately. I’ve also been working on a couple of really long posts, so there’s that.
I’ve also been doing even more reading. I just finished The Secret Life of Bees (not what you’d call current, I know). I was not impressed. The blurb reviews describe Sue Monk Kidd as a latter-day Carson McCullers. She’s not. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the book seemed to boil down to this:
Racism was prevalent in the deep South in the sixties! Black women sure are maternal! Southern people sure are colorful! Abusive fathers suck!
It was deep like Crash was deep: it said a bunch of obvious things, and some rather regressive things (e.g. a white racist cop has Learned an Important Lesson if he’s willing to pull a woman out of a burning car even if she’s black), and then tried to get its readers to confuse “obvious” with “profound” and “regressive” with “honest.”
The story goes like this:
Lily is a fourteen-year-old white girl who lives on a peach farm with her widowed dad, who despises her, and Rosaleen, a pragmatic-yet-loving black woman who is the housekeeper and Lily’s surrogate mother. Lily’s mom was shot when she was a small child, and Lily has grown up believing that she shot her mother. Then Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, and Rosaleen decides to go into town to register to vote. On the way, she encounters some racist white men who harass her. She tells them she’s going into town to register. They say ugly racist things. She dumps her snuff jar on their feet. She is arrested and viciously beaten. Then she’s taken to the hospital. Lily breaks her out of the hospital, and they skip town. Lily found a picture of a black madonna among her mother’s things, with “Tiburon, SC” written on it. Lily convinces Rosaleen–who’s really down-to-Earth, and therefore skeptical–to go to Tiburon.
When they get there, they see Black Madonna Honey in the general store, and they find out that it’s made by a trio of black sisters, May, June, and August. They find the sisters’ house, and the sisters take them in. It turns out that the sisters are really maternal and full of homespun wisdom. They’re also devotees of a Mary-focused religion with an origin myth about a black madonna statue coming into the possession of a group of slaves (this was the only part of the book that wasn’t irritating, probably because it happened long before Lily was born). Rosaleen registers to vote. Lily gets self-actualized, finds out about her mother, learns all about feminine power and bees, defeats prejudice, and has her first teenage romance. Then her father shows up, and of course they send him packing.
Lily also learns the truth about her mother. As it turns out, August worked for her mother’s family when her mother was a little girl, and they loved each other very very much. Then Lily’s mother married Lily’s father, and was miserable. Then Lily’s mother fled her abusive marriage, and August and the sisters took her in. Like mother, like daughter.
Bees read more like a book-club update of the Mammy stereotype than anything else. There were four present Mamas in the book: Rosaleen, the protective mama; August, the wise mama; June, the hardass mama and also the shrewish black woman (she’s been stringing that poor man of hers along for decades); and May, the soft-hearted mama (she’s got a Lauren Olamina empathy thing going on). Throughout the story, they serve Lily, ladling out love to compensate for the death of her mother.
The sisters are never very pissy or uncharitable or absent-minded or lazy or selfish or bored or thoughtless or insulting. They don’t kick her out. They don’t threaten to kick her out. They don’t insist that she stop lying to them. They don’t wonder whether this whole arrangement could cause them problems. Only June is initially annoyed–and she’s pretty forbearing–but she comes around in the end and apologizes to Lily for resenting her and her mother. Rosaleen sort of passes the baton to them, and they all take Lily in.
There’s also the freedom Mary, but she doesn’t ever make Lily pancakes. And she enters the story as an inspiration for revolution, a woman with a raised fist, an escape artist. Then she becomes Lily’s Aunt Agony, but I just sort of blocked that part out.
It’s a very queer idea of empowerment, this indiscriminate and self-sacrificing love, empowerment as service. The book links it both to black people and to women. August at one point:
“‘This is where I spent my summers,’ she said. ‘You see, the house belonged to my grandparents, and all this property around it. Big Mama kept bees, too, right out there in the same spot they’re in today. Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, ’cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.'”
The bee trope was a little disturbing on several levels, actually. Bees were used as an example of a harmonious matriarchal society, and the queen’s role was heavily romanticized–she was the “mother of thousands,” rather than, “the one who has to breed an entire fucking beehive.” Not such a progressive metaphor after all, but an apt one for the subtext.