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After my morning of capturing bees, I spent the afternoon in the peach stand out on the highway, selling T. Ray’s peaches. It was the loneliest summer job a girl could have, stuck in a roadside hut with three walls and a flat tin roof.
I sat on a Coke crate and watched pickups zoom by till I was nearly poisoned with exhaust fumes and boredom. Thursday afternoons were usually a big peach day, with women getting ready for Sunday cobblers, but not a soul stopped.
T. Ray refused to let me bring books out here and read, and if I smuggled one out, say, Lost Horizon, stuck under my shirt, somebody, like Mrs. Watson from the next farm, would see him at church and say, “Saw your girl in the peach stand reading up a storm. You must be proud.” And he would half kill me.
What kind of person is against reading? I think he believed it would stir up ideas of college, which he thought a waste of money for girls, even if they did, like me, score the highest number a human being can get on their verbal aptitude test. Math aptitude is another thing, but people aren’t meant to be overly bright in everything.
I was the only student who didn’t groan and carry on when Mrs. Henry assigned us another Shakespeare play. Well actually, I did pretend to groan, but inside I was as thrilled as if I’d been crowned Sylvan’s Peach Queen.
Up until Mrs. Henry came along, I’d believed beauty college would be the upper limit of my career. Once, studying her face, I told her if she was my customer, I would give her a French twist that would do wonders for her, and she said – and I quote – “Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You could be a professor or a writer with actual books to your credit. Beauty school. Please.”
” It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities. You know how adults love to ask, “So what are you going be when you grow up? I can’t tell you how much I’d hated that question, but suddenly I was going around volunteering to people, people who didn’t even want to know, that I planned to be a professor and a writer of actual books.
I kept a collection of my writings. For a while everything I wrote had a horse in it. After we read Ralph Waldo Emerson in class, I wrote “My Philosophy of Life,” which I intended for the start of a book but could only get three pages out of it. Mrs. Henry said I needed to live past fourteen years old before I would have a philosophy.
She said a scholarship was my only hope for a future and lent me her private books for the summer. Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.
Without books in the peach stand, I often passed the time making up poems, but that slow afternoon I didn’t have the patience for rhyming words. I just sat out there and thought about how much I hated the peach stand, how completely and absolutely I hated it.
Sue monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees is a novel that completely reshaped how I thought of familial relationships and the significance of forging one’s path forward. The desire to feel love and to be loved by those around you drives this novel forward, highlighting the rare and unique authority that maternal spirit and femininity hold. Exhaust Clouds is a blackout poem I wrote from an excerpt from Kidd’s novel; a short commentary on the loneliness of coming of age as a young girl in a world that is distant and unwelcoming, I found that the underlying themes of familial/environmental vices and misogyny in the original text created an opportunity to textualize the internal struggles of growing into womanhood today. I highly recommend this book to anyone, as it has left a lasting impression that I know anyone who takes a read will experience as well.
The full excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd can be found here.
Sydney Finley, of Louisville, Ky., is a member of the McConnell Scholar Class of 2023 at the University of Louisville where she studies Public and Professional Writing (English), Political Science under the Law and Public Policy track, and Peace, Justice & Conflict Transformation.