Before the book came into my possession, I’d been capturing bees in my kitchen apron and releasing them back outdoors. Twice, large, black bumblebees mazed their way to my upstairs bedroom and butted themselves furiously against my window-panes, humms lost in the chiffon mist of blowing curtain, wings dashing to be free.

"I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up." ~ Lily in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees

That’s just what I felt like, too, when I finally started the book. While Lily Owens entered her new life and home, I felt I was entering into a newer love for this world, and all the ordinary people who make it beautiful.I felt sad as well, every time I took a breath or turned a page and realized that I couldn’t stay. The story would end and I’d be here again, in an equally less lovely world, but unequally unsolvable. The story has ended, well circled in family love, full of happy mothers and a girl who’s found herself. Happy, of course, it’s a novel. True or false, I have returned different. I know what to think, now–truths for my falsehood.

Bees have stripes.
Yellow, black.
Yellow, black.
As for me, Chinese yellow, I don’t know where my Black went. Raised outside the hive, I don’t hum the same. I don’t talk their language, or even speak it. I feel. . . different.
And being treated different, in very thought and deed and deeds-received, AM different. Rebel bee? No, just lost a stripe. Paint it on? I canot. They start from your insides, and pass your heart.
Prejudiced? What, against myself? Maybe. In a secret life, where sweetness decays, and the gold-brown honey of my skin fades to the black darkness of my many-threaded heart.
But the entire, exhusting, foreign experience of being among (part of) my own race and being frightened, amazed, out-of-place. . . is less secret now. For the first time in my life, I feel a little. . . What do you call it? "Black pride." Something of the sisters brushed on me, startled me from somewhere deep inside, and swelled up past my heart.