I knew they would not take this news lying down, not in one million years. Rosaleen had left dinner on the stove top, her famous smothered chicken. As I fixed T. Ray had never paid attention to in all the years of my life, but every year, like a dope, I got my hopes up thinking this year would be the one. I had the same birthday as the country, which made it even harder to get noticed.
When I was little, I thought people were sending up rockets and cherry bombs because of me — hurray, Lily was born! Then reality set in, like it always did. I wanted to tell T. I watched him pull the chicken meat from around the bone with his fork. The house creaked like it did once in a while. Outside the door Snout gave a low bark, and then the air grew so quiet I could hear the food being ground up in T. I started to say, So then, what about the bracelet? I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.
I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me. When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T.
When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts. I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.
To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two. The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.
When I looked up through the web of trees, the night feel over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged, but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. I sat up, panicked, buttoning my shirt. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing.
I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach. I jammed the gloves and pictures under the waistband of my shorts, then reached for the rest of the buttons with shaking fingers. Before I could fasten them, light poured down on me and there he was without a shirt, holding a flashlight. The beam swept and zagged, blinding me when it swung across my eyes.
I followed him back to the house. His feet struck the ground so hard I felt sorry for the black earth. You act no better than a slut. He poured a mound of grits the size of an anthill onto the pine floor.
I walked toward them with those tiny feather steps you expect of a girl in Japan, and lowered myself to the floor, determined not to cry, but the sting was already gathering in my eyes. Ray sat in a chair and cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. I swayed from knee to knee, hoping for a second or two of relief, but the pain cut deep into my skin. I bit down on my lip, and it was then I felt the wooden picture of black Mary underneath my waistband.
The next morning I woke up late. She looked down at my knees and stopped sweeping. They were swollen with hundreds of red welts, pinprick bruises that would grow into a blue stubble across my skin.
Ray stomped through the back door. This will sound crazy, but up until then I thought T. Ray probably loved me some. I could never forget the time he smiled at me in church when I was singing with the hymn book upside down. I understood that a new rooftop would do wonder for me. Late that afternoon I caught two more bees.
Rosaleen stared at me, sagged low on her big ankles. She stayed with her back to me a moment, unmoving. When she turned, her face looked soft and changed, like a different Rosaleen. Her hand dipped into her pocket, where her fingers crawled around for something. She drew out a folded piece of notebook paper and came to sit beside me on the bed. I rubbed my knees while she smoothed out the paper across her lap.
Her name, Rosaleen Daise, was written twenty-five times at least down the page in large, careful cursive, like the first paper you turn in when school starts. An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. Last night the television had said a man in Mississippi was killed for registering to vote, and I myself had overheard Mr. Bussey, one of the deacons, say to T. At sunset he shuffled up, sweaty from work. I met him at the kitchen door, my arms folded across the front of my blouse.
I need to buy some sanitary supplies. That night I looked at the jar of bees on my dresser. The poor creatures perched on the bottom barely moving, obviously pining away for flight.
I thought about the way my mother had built trails of graham-cracker crumbs and marshmallow to lure roaches from the house rather than step on them. I unscrewed the lid and set it aside. They crawled on their stalk legs around the curved perimeters of the glass as if the world had shrunk to that jar. I tapped the glass, even laid the jar on its side, but those crazy bees stayed put.
The bees were still in there the next morning when Rosaleen showed up. She was bearing an angel food cake with fourteen candles. We sat down and ate two slices each with glasses of milk. Later I would remember that, how she set out, a marked woman from the beginning. Sylvan was miles away. We walked along the ledge of the highway, Rosaleen moving at the pace of a bank-vault door, her spit jug fastened on her finger.
Haze hung under the trees and every inch of air smelled overripe with peaches. My knees were aching to the point that I was struggling to keep up with her.
A car swept by, slinging scalded air and a layer of dust. Rosaleen was slick with heat. She mopped her face and breathed hard. We were coming to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where T. Ray and I attended. The steeple jutted through a cluster of shade trees; below, the red bricks looked shadowy and cool. I led us down front and sat in the second pew, having room for Rosaleen. She plucked a paper fan from the hymnbook holder and studied the picture on it — a white church with a smiling white lady coming out the door.
Rosaleen fanned and I listened to little jets of air come off her hands. She never went to church herself, but on those few times T. The finish was rubbed off the sides of the picture where her thumbs had held it. But it drew me to her to think she loved water rocks and woodpecker feathers, that she had a single picture of her mother just like I did. Then he saw Rosaleen and started to rub the bald space on his head with such agitation I thought he might rub down to the skull bone.
She was not supposed to be inside here. Every time a rumor got going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning, the deacons stood locked-arms across the church steps to turn them away. We loved them in the Lord, Brother Gerald said, but they had their own places.
He made a thin sound, intended for a laugh. He smiled, satisfied, and walked beside me all the way to the door, with Rosaleen tagging behind. Outside, the sky had whited over with clouds, and shine spilled across the surfaces, sending motes before my eyes. We came into Sylvan on the worst side of town. Old houses set up on cinder blocks. Fans wedged in the windows. Dirt yards. Women in pink curlers. Collarless dogs. After a few blocks we approached the Esso station on the corner of West Market and Church Street, generally recognized as a catchall place for men with too much time on their hands.
I noticed that not a single car was getting gas. Three men sat in dinette chairs beside the garage with a piece of plywood balanced on their knees. They were playing cards.
He looked up and saw us, Rosaleen fanning and shuffling, swaying side to side. Firecrackers made a spattering sound in the distance. We got ourselves a model citizen. I heard a slow song of wind drift ever so slightly in the street behind us and move along the gutter.
We walked, and the men pushed back their makeshift table and came right down to the curb to wait for us, like they were spectators at a parade and we were the prize float.
For a second they stared down at the juice, dribbled like car oil across their shoes. They blinked, trying to make it register. When they looked up, I watched their faces go from surprise to anger, then outright fury. They lunged at her, and everything started to spin. There was Rosaleen, grabbed and thrashing side to side, swinging the men like pocketbooks on her arms, and the men yelling for her to apologize and clean their shoes.
And then the cry of birds overhead, sharp as needles, sweeping from low-bough trees, stirring up the scent of pine, and even then I knew I would recoil all my life from the smell of it. By then Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass.
Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye. It curved under her chin the way tears do. Rosaleen climbed in, sliding over on the seat. I moved after her, sliding as she slid, sitting as she sat. The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.
Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy. The Secret Life of Bees — Excerpt. This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. As Mr. Bussey tells T. Proud and determined, Rosaleen practices until she can correctly write her name.
Rosaleen, however, seems unfazed. She speaks her mind, even when doing so will get her in trouble. After Rosaleen and Lily escape and things start to look hopeless on the road, they have a moment of confrontation. Rosaleen went along with Lily but not without some misgivings. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Her previous roles include, Hidden Figures and The Help.
She is an inspiring African American actor that speaks to many through her acting and an author. Her role model position to Lily is important throughout the movie as they struggle to fit in with the Boatwrights. She also helps teaches Lily that it is important to love and forgive, as well as some important lessons about race.
Apologizing to those men would have just been a different way of dying. She knows whats right and how to take care of herself. This also teaches the audience as well as Lily an important lesson about race; it is either stick up and live or apologize and have your soul die for colored people.
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