Michelle Bishop Writes

Ask questions, demand answers…

Click the link below to read an except from the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from  the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.

http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book/excerpt/

Maybe we need to think about our perceptions of black men and women…

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a coming of age story of a young white girl, Lily Owens, growing up in the rural South in 1964. The author has the African-American Civil Rights Movement as a backdrop for a story about Lily’s search for her self-identity through her quest to learn more about her mother.

It has been more than two years since I read the book and roughly twenty-four hours since I viewed the movie version starring Queen Latifah, Dana Owens.  This is one circumstance where the movie did the book a great favor.  Due to the time constraints of film, certain concepts were condensed into single phrases that encapsulated the very essence of the book, for example, at the opening scene Lily’s voice over states:

I killed my mother when I was four years old.  That’s
what I knew about myself. She was all I wanted and I
took her away.

Here we see what is meant to be the premise of the book and the film.  Lily must be propelled by fate to gain self-awareness.  This process begins with her running away from her abusive father, freeing her nanny, Rosaleen, from hospital arrest for insulting a white man, and making her way to the home of May, June, and August Boatwright where she and Rosaleen find a safe haven and Lily starts to learn about herself and the suffering of others.

Without going into great detail and revealing the plot to those who have neither read the book nor seen the movie, there are typical coming of age issues that arise: learning a trade (bee-keeping), first love, death, injustice, and forgiveness.  As a fan of Southern literature, I am instantly gratified by a tale set in the South that addresses these issues in an intelligent fashion.  As an advocate of women’s literature, I am delighted to enjoy a well-written tale of a young lady facing her own demons and coming out stronger and better for it.  However, as an African-American woman, I find the story to be all too common in a fundamental way: once again, the story of African-American women is being told by a Caucasian woman. While the stories of how African and African-American women and their Caucasian counterparts interacted in the past is an important one for a full understanding of our history as a nation, it is unfortunate that the story of the Boatwright sisters was not told from their point of view.

Some of the themes I imagine may be overlooked by traditional reviewers of this story are: 1) Lily starting her interaction with the Boatwright sisters with a lie and its symbolic correlation to the interactions whites have traditionally had with people of color around the world using lies and manipulation that caused confusion/disintegration of the social network; and 2) Lily bringing the outside and its violence into the sanctuary the Boatwright sisters had created for themselves and its symbolism for the way whites have brought violence and death through oppression to the shores of every land they invaded; and 3) Lily’s lack of regard and understanding of the real danger African-American boys/men faced (and continue to face) in a racist society (READ: American society not simply Southern society) brought death physically and symbolically to the tenderheartedness in African people that saves the Caucasian people from utter annihilation every day – when May dies, so do all good-hearted people.

It will be easy to talk about the secrets of the bees and the secrets of life. It will be easy to talk about racism in the rural South (as though it never existed in the North although there were only two states in the US that had no reports of lynchings).  It will be easy to talk about overcoming hate and budding interracial relationships. There will be many discussions about May’s wailing wall and dealing with pain and loss.  And, there will be a lot of talk about Lily learning about herself, learning that love is messy and people are a mess, and learning that forgiving herself for the accident that killed her mother so long ago would free her to become the woman she should grow into – strong, beautiful, and resilient.

But, will there be discussion about the African-American women who reared white children only to be reviled by them later in life?  Will there be discussion of the women who left their own families to take care of the children of the people who belittled and humilated them each day?  Will we hear the tales of the Boatwright sisters in their own voices?  More importantly, will there be brave discussion of why, even in the early part of the so-called new millenium, the story of a young white girl telling the stories of African-American women is the best we can hope for in popular culture in the US?

M.B.
3 March 2009