Lily, the main character in The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd), begins the book as a disengaged, troubled, sheltered, and insecure teen. Her quest to solve the mystery of her mother's life takes her on a journey that is inward and outward, so that as the book ends, she has transformed to a person who is happier, wiser, more confident, and more empathetic.
Lily lives in the country, near a small Southern town, and the book begins in 1964 as the Civil Rights Act is about to become signed. Her mother died when Lily was four, and there is some mystery surrounding her death. Lily's father, T. Ray, while not exactly an evil villain, is not the father of the year, either. He lacks a mother's touch and sympathy and punishes Lily quite cruelly, by making her kneel on grits for hours. (If you have never done this, I do not advise it. It's like kneeling on crushed glass.) The only "mother" in Lily's life is Rosaleen, an African-American, who is a kind of housekeeper/nanny who has no children but does love Lily and try to protect her. Lily's worldview is constructed from her surroundings, and so she holds a low opinion of African-Americans, aspires only to work in a beauty shop, and is crippled by what she does not know about her mother and her mother's death.
When Lily and Rosaleen run away to Tiburon, South Carolina, Lily is following the only clue she has about her mother, a wooden plaque that has pasted upon it a picture of an African-American Mary or Madonna and the name of this town on its back. Lily and Rosaleen are lucky enough to make their way to the Boatwright sisters, August, June, and May, who keep bees and make their living selling honey. They meet a whole cast of characters through the Boatwright sisters, including the Daughters of Mary and Zach, a young African-American who works for the sisters and wants to be an attorney. It is here that Lily solves the mystery of her mother and her mother's death, learning that her mother had run away from T. Ray and that Lily herself, accidentally, was responsible for her mother's death. This journey's end is a transformational one for Lily in many ways.
As she lives with the Boatwright sisters and slowly falls in love with Zach, she looks within herself and examines her prejudices about African-Americans, coming to understand that they are people like any others, with the same feelings and thoughts as white people. This alone would be an extraordinary transformation in that time and place, but Lily also grows as a person as she confronts her own role in her mother's death and learns that marriage and love are more complicated than she had understood.
She learns that her mother was trying to leave, that her father was trying to stop her mother, and that somehow, in the midst of that fray, Lily accidentally shot her mother and she died. She learns that the Boatwright sisters had taken her mother in and tried to help her heal from what seems to have been severe depression, as well as an unhappy marriage. This allows her to have some insight into her parents, which is a sure sign of maturity. She is learning not to judge so much and to understand that relationships are complex, not easily reducible to good or bad. In effect, she is working on forgiving herself and forgiving her parents for being what parents inevitably are, imperfect. At the same time, Lily is also becoming a more fully engaged person.
Lily is offered a new form of spirituality and meaningful work at the Boatwright house. She learns how to care for the bees and very gradually becomes absorbed into the spirituality of the household through the Black Mary, a figurehead from a ship that symbolizes freedom for the Daughters of Mary, and in a way, freedom for Lily, too, since she is breaking the chains of her unhappy past. She comes to understand that she can be a writer, something that one teacher had suggested, but that she had thought an impossibility until she meets Zach, who encourages her to go for it and leads by example with his own plans to become an attorney.
The forces that send Lily on the run expose her to a new world, one that helps her grow as a person in so many ways. She learns about love. She learns about prejudice. She learns about empathy. She learns that families are not perfect and that they can be created by bonds other than blood. She gains spiritually and intellectually. And at the end of the book, she is well on her way to being a happier, wiser, more fully engaged human being.
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