40 pages • 1 hour read
Sue Monk KiddThe Secret Life of Bees
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
The women at the pink house wake up to what will be one of the hottest days of the year. August takes Lily along to “water” the bees, and Lily is stung for the first time. When August and Lily are back at the house after lunch, they are pulled into a sprinkler session with the hose that Rosaleen and May are having on the front lawn. After August and Lily join in, June comes outside and yells at them for making too much noise. Lily sprays June with the hose, and while she June initially angry, she eventually collapses with Lily soaking wet on the lawn, and when they get up, June hugs Lily. Everyone in the house goes to bed early, and when Lily can’t sleep, she goes into the pink house to find May making a trail of marshmallows and graham crackers to lead a cockroach out the door safely. Lily doesn’t pay much attention to this until she recalls one of the only things T. Ray ever told her about her mother: She didn’t like to kill anything, and she wouldn’t even squish a cockroach; instead she would lead them out the door with trails of marshmallows and graham crackers. Lily decides to ask May if she knew her mother, to which May immediately responds in the affirmative. Lily can’t ask May any more questions about her mother because May starts humming “Oh! Susannah.”
Lily has a dream of her mother in which she has the body of a woman and the legs of a cockroach. This new information sets Lily on edge, and while she desperately wants to ask August about her mother, she is still too afraid to do so. Lily accompanies Zach on a ride to town, where a group of white men are pacing around the theater, presumably waiting for the famous movie star and his Black date. Zach joins a group of boys he sees standing across the street from the theater, and one of the white men yells at them. One of the boys in the group throws a coke bottle at the men, and when the police come and none of the boys confess to doing it, all of them are taken to jail, including Zach. Mr. Clayton, Zach’s lawyer friend who buys honey from August, takes the case, but Zach still won’t be out of jail for a few days. Lily tells Zach she will write a story about everything that has happened. The sisters’ plan not to tell May the news for fear she won’t be able to take it backfires: When May finds out anyway, she is sent into a catatonic state that none of them has witnessed before.
Chapter 10 Summary
After May has been at the wailing wall for 20 minutes, everyone in the house goes to look for her. August finds May in the river with a stone from the wailing wall placed over her chest. May has drowned herself. Lily moves into May’s room with Rosaleen, and August and June retreat into their own private days of mourning. The sisters enter into a mourning period during which May’s body is displayed in the house while the Daughters come by every day to visit. Mr. Clayton shows up at the house on the first day of May’s memorial with Zach, who was released when one of the eyewitnesses told the police who threw the bottle. During the memorial, the Daughters share funny stories about the viewing parlor at the white people’s funeral home, and Lily is happy that no one stops the joking just because she is white.
On the second morning of the vigil, June and August find a note from May. May explains why she had to leave, saying she can’t carry her burden of grief any longer. She says that it is her time to die and their time to live. August and June cry in each other’s arms, and then August, for the first time, tells June outright that she needs to marry Neil.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
On the hottest day of the year, Lily feels betrayed by her first bee sting because she tells August she was “sending them love” (167). August replies, “Hot weather makes the bees out of sorts, I don’t care how much love you send them” (167). This exchange foreshadows the irritation that the heat will bring about for the characters.
June and Lily experience a moment of levity in their relationship when Lily sprays June with the hose and then, after playing in the water, June hugs her. This moment speaks to August’s future explanation to Lily that one should better trust the timing of things—when to press forward and when to pull back. On this day and in this moment, Lily knew to press forward with June, and it worked.
Lily’s dream of her mother as half cockroach is symbolic of how Lily will soon no longer be able to maintain her romanticized view of Deborah. Lily will see the truth, and some of the ugliness, in her mother.
The scene of Zach’s arrest mirrors the scene of Rosaleen and Lily’s arrest at the beginning of the book. Lily has the same request of Zach as she did of Rosaleen: to avoid the trouble, to leave, to keep themselves safe. While Zach doesn’t heed these requests any more than Rosaleen did, Lily is more understanding of how this experience ignites a fire and anger in Zach that might be beneficial, even though it worries Lily. Lily recognizes this same kind of fire in Rosaleen when she thinks to herself, “If August is the red heart on Mary’s chest, Rosaleen is the fist” (182). Lily is starting to see how anger and fire are good and important when she gazes upon Mary’s fist.
The power of storytelling is brought up in this section when August uses a bee metaphor for communicating with Zach that she will not stop coming for him until she can bring him home. Lily also promises Zach that she will write down everything that has happened in a story. Lily thinks to herself that writing down a story is “something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters” (185). What Lily is describing is exactly what May has been doing at the wailing wall.
The significance of May drowning herself with one of the stones from the wailing wall is that the grief of Zach’s arrest was too great for even the stone wall to hold. May’s grief became so large she had to place herself in the wall. When June and August pull May out of the river, Lily sees that they have been waiting for this moment for many years. While neither June nor August experienced the same grief that May did, they experienced May’s troubles as a grief of their own, a grief for the future that they have been warding off for years.
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By Sue Monk Kidd
