When Jodi and Dick Stratford formed the Falcon Book Club, they wanted to bring a group of people together for thoughtful conversation. The first book chosen by club members accomplished that goal and more. Members got to know one another while discussing “The Secret Life of Bees,” by Sue Monk Kidd.The book is a coming-of-age tale of an adolescent girl, Lily Owens, growing up in the south during the 1960s. Kidd relates how humans need the love of a strong mother figure in order to become emotionally whole, while skillfully blending bits and pieces of the science of bee keeping into the story.Book club members said Kidd’s writing also transported them back into a time many of us would like to forget, when injustice and racial discrimination were commonplace. But, as Tom Preble, a journalist and rancher from Peyton, pointed out, “The author presented a very balanced story by creating characters with realistic personalities.”There were no totally good or bad people; instead, every character had some decent attributes and human flaws we could all relate to. And Kidd’s ability to place the reader directly into the southern environment created a story most of us didn’t want to put down.Lily begins her life on a peach farm in South Carolina, with a callous, uncaring father and very few memories of her mother. The memories she does possess are not very comforting. She remembers a gun in her hand, a large blast and her mother no longer being there.T. Ray, her father, shows more affection for his hound dog than his daughter. He hires Rosaleen, one of his black field hands, to care for Lily after her mother’s death. Lily spends much of her childhood fantasizing about her mother, desperately clinging to the few mementos her mother left behind. They include a pair of white gloves and a wooden framed picture of a Black Madonna with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina” written on the back.Rosaleen never quite gives Lily the love she would have received from her mother, but the two of them do form an inseparable bond. And when Rosaleen, spurred on by the civil rights movement of 1964, walks into town to register to vote, Lily goes with her.The story takes an all-too-expected turn, when on the way to town Rosaleen is involved in an altercation with three white men. Tired of the white men’s verbal abuse, Rosaleen dumps her snuff jug onto one man’s shoes. The men severely beat her after she refuses to apologize, and she is arrested for assault and disturbing the peace.When Rosaleen requires hospitalization for her injuries, Lily manages to sneak her past a guard, and the two hitch a ride to the only place Lily can think of, Tiburon. Stepping into a grocery store in Tiburon, Lily finds the source of the Black Madonna picture she treasured, a label on a jar of honey. She asks the shopkeeper where the honey comes from, and he tells her it’s produced by a black woman named August Boatwright, who lives on the outskirts of town in a house painted the same color as Pepto-Bismol.Lily instinctively knows the pink house contains the answers she is seeking about her mother, while Rosaleen is looking for any sanctuary from the police. They enter a strange enclave of three sisters, August, May, and June, and a world of characters that draw strength from each other and the spiritual essence of the Black Madonna.Kate Wilson, a teacher living in Falcon, said she loved the story because the author draws you into the lives of each of these characters, while making an analogy between bees and human society. Kidd shows how individual bees have different functions in their communal society, but without a queen, the hive becomes dysfunctional and dies. It is the queen bee that generates all life within the hive.Read the “Secret Life of Bees” to discover how Lily finds her “Queen;” and join the Falcon Book Club at Espresso Statfords, located at 7654 McLaughlin Rd. The club is open to everyone and meets at 6:30 p.m. on the last Thursday of every month to discuss the current book and choose a new one for the following month.
