This summer I chose to read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.  I chose this book because my aunt had read it and said she liked it also because on the back it is described as, “...a story woman will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come” on the back cover.  It is a book about a young white girl named Lily that takes place in South Carolina during the 1960’s. She killed her mother by accident when she was 4 and has been desperate to know her ever since. So when she is finally fed up with her abusive father, she and her blunt, black, stand-in-mother Rosaleen hitchhike to Tiburon, South Carolina, a place where Lily thinks she can find out more about her mother’s past through the 3 attentive, black, beekeeping sisters that take them in.  Lily, the main character, fascinated me, so she is who I did my annotations on.

    I chose to focus in on Lily not because she is the main character and that would be easy but because her views of the world especially living where and when she did, took me by surprise.  She lived in a racist place, in a racist time, in an unhappy home. But not for one second did someone who is black seem lesser or someone to avoid/ be cautious around. It would make sense if she were racist, she is a young impressionable white child living with a constantly angry father and all the adults surrounding her expressing their views that white people are superior.  It wouldn’t matter that she is being raised by a black woman, most people were in that time and they still ended up racist. Yet it never fazed her.

    When Lily arrives at the pink house and meets June, May then August she doesn’t even mention them being black when describing her first impressions.  When she meets June her first reaction is, “When the door opened it was not the woman in white but another one wearing red, her hair cut so short it resembled a little gray, curlicue swimming cap pulled tight over her scalp…” and the same goes for when she describes the rest of the sisters (Kidd Ch. 4, location 68, par. 10).  Later in the book you find out that the sisters are black but not until Lily feels self-conscious about being the only white person in the room. Most white people in that time it would be the first thing they noticed. But Lily didn’t care, it never bothered her that she entered and lived in a black person’s home. That is not something you would see then, nowadays it's no big deal but back then it was huge.  You see another example of her not bothered by skin color when she is talking about Zachary and says, “I couldn’t restrain myself from touching his face, the place where his dimple carved into his skin” (Kidd Ch. 7, location 135, par. 3). She didn’t care that he was black, she just knew that she was attracted to him. It didn’t concern her that he wasn’t white or that white and black people couldn’t be together in that time.  It’s really a very beautiful glance into her personality. Knowing that she will make judgements more on how to treat people than on how you look.

    Reading this book impacted me personally because it taught me how beneficial it is to judge a person on their actions instead of their appearance.  It's a don’t judge a book by it's cover lesson. How a person looks shouldn’t matter to you, what should is how they treat others. If we decide to only talk to people of our own race or religion there will be so many missed opportunities to find good people worth your time and it would really limit you.  The more diversity you surround yourself with the the more you will understand and learn about other cultures, religions, and lifestyles. This book has made me recognize how important it is to have an open mind about people different from me just like Lily.