Secret Life of Bees -- Essay

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Twice she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually reemerged like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night" (Kidd, p. 67). Bees creating "wreaths around her head" is adding another image to the element of honey and bees. In the ancient Greco-Roman world people wore wreaths as an indication of their rank in society, or their status, or their occupation. Apollo wore a wreath of laurel on his head, according to the literature. Laurel is used today when Olympic medals are given out, to pay homage to the original Olympic Games and the champions that trained so hard to achieve glory. And the Romans copied the Greeks by using laurel wreaths as symbols of achievement in the arts, I literature, education and government. Ovid, probably the most well-known poet in ancient Rome, is often pictured with a laurel wreath in his hair.

Because August has a cloud of bees circling her head like a wreath, readers can assume that Kidd created that image for a reason. In fact August disappears briefly because the wreath of bees is so thick, but gradually August comes back into focus "…like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night." For Lily, finding these women beekeepers must have been like a dream that rose up from the pits that represented where she used to live and the father that used to make her kneel for hours in the grits.

Elements of Fiction (Civil Rights): In Garrine P. Laney's book The Voting Rights Act of 1965: Historical Background and Current Issues, the author explains that various Supreme Court decisions that led up to the Civil Rights Movement had not been favorable to Blacks. When Blacks went about trying to vote, as Rosaleen did, the racist white authorities would do everything they could to block Blacks from having that opportunity to vote. As was mentioned earlier in this paper, one of the strengths of Kidd's book is that it ties in with the real history of the South in the Sixties.

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Laney points out that blocking Blacks from voting wasn't a new form of injustice, as the Supreme Court had declared civil rights laws that Congress passed after the Civil War ended (during Reconstruction) to be "unconstitutional" (Laney, 2003, p. 3).

Moreover, states like Alabama were so viciously bigoted and determined to prevent Blacks from having the right to vote, they passed laws denying Blacks their right to vote. In 1957, Laney explains (p. 6), the Alabama legislature (passing Act. No. 140) drew new boundaries to the city of Tuskegee "to exclude Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and a majority of the nearly 5,400 Black residents" there.

"All but two southern states used literacy tests as voting limitation devices," Laney goes on (p. 4). In Florida, payment of the poll tax meant that you could vote, but a Black voter who paid the tax and was registered might still find that "his name was not on the voters list" (Laney, p. 5). The reality that perhaps doesn't find its way into books and articles is that many Blacks were beaten savagely when they tried to vote. When Rosaleen tried to vote and was beaten, Lily, a white girl, symbolized what is right and just in America -- she fought back against blatant racism. Today Blacks do have suffrage rights, but there is still a long way to go before fairness and justice exists for all ethnicities and races in this country.

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