How would you describe Zach and Lily's relationship in The Secret Life of Bees?
Zach and Lily are attracted to each other and have a typical fourteen year old crush type of relationship, except they struggle with the fact that they are of different races. At first, Lily meets Zach and is surprised that she is attracted to him, because she is used to thinking that black people are not attractive. She says,
“If he was shocked over me being white, I was shocked over him being handsome. At my school they made fun of colored people’s lips and noses. I myself had laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in. Now I wished I could pen a letter to my school to be read at opening assembly that would tell them how wrong we’d all been” (pg 116).
As her attraction grows, she struggles with the thought that it is impossible to have a relationship with Zach,
“It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That’s what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility” (133).
Regardless of what Lily tells herself, she cannot stop loving Zach. And Zach is crazy about Lily as well. He seems to really understand her, and gives her a notebook to encourage her writing. Lily, in turn, supports Zach in his dream to become a lawyer, even though it will be extremely difficult for a black boy to pursue this career in the deep South. Zach is dedicated to Lily, and dedicated to changing the world. He tells Lily, “We can’t be together now, Lily, but one day, after I’ve gone away and become somebody, I’m gonna find you, and we’ll be together then” (231). Zach wants to create a world where it will be okay for a white person and a black person to love each other. He says, “We can’t think of changing our skin… Change the world – that’s how we gotta think” (pg 216). Luckily, since 1964, because of people like Zach, we now live a lot more equally. It is much more common to have interracial couples, schools and other public places are integrated, and even our President is the child of an interracial couple, showing just how far we’ve really come today.
How would you describe Zach and Lily's relationship in The Secret Life of Bees?
Because Zach is African-American and Lilly is Caucasian, their "friendship" and eventually their love is taboo because of the time period. Keep in mind that this novel is set in the deep south, so racism runs rampant. This can easily be seen in the scenes in which Zach is beat up by the white men and the through the issues of voting and Civil Rights.
These two have a relationship that begins as a friendship that slowly blossoms into one of a more romantic nature. In today's society, interracial relationships are rather commonplace, and Zach and Lilly's relationship would not be so highly frowned upon as it is in the book.
Their relationship faces limitations set up by the setting of the book: location and year. If those two factors change, then the entire context and acceptance of their relationship can change too.
In "The Secret Life of Bees", what insight about Zach is revealed by his statement to Lily?
Zach says this to Lily because in their world of South Carolina in 1964, an interracial couple is an impossibility. Zach is black, while Lily is white, and Lily dreams of becoming black so she can be with Zach. Instead, he wants to change the world by becoming a lawyer and fighting for social change.
Lily says that the events of 1964, including the riots in New Jersey and Malcolm X's philosophy of direct confrontation with whites, have affected Zach and made him angry. She says, "coming into his presence was like stepping up to a gas heater, to a row of blue fire burning in the dark, wet curve of his eyes." Zach is impassioned and dedicated to pursuing social justice. He is intelligent, informed, and committed to changing the world so that people can love who they want and be who they want, no matter what the color of their skin, and he has the drive and commitment to pursue what he imagines.
In "The Secret Life of Bees", what insight about Zach is revealed by his statement to Lily?
This clearly reveals a lot about Zach's character and how he views the issue of racism in his world. For him, the solution to racism is not about trying to act white or to blend into a white world or even to withdraw from it completely and life segregated lives where blacks can live without fear and in peace. Zach understands that the only solution to the issue of racism is to change the entire world and the attitudes that have created racism in the first place.
This is obviously a very radical solution and it clearly shows the commitment that Zach has to change, no matter how difficult. It also seems to foreshadow the Civil Rights movement and their battle for equality and their refusal to live in a world that was shaped for them by whites any more. This quote tells us that Zach is a passionate, principled and committed individual who sets himself to do what is right no matter how hard or challenging that path may be.
How would you describe Lily and Zach's relationship in The Secret Life of Bees?
Lily and Zach's relationship begins with friendship. Lily says the first time they meet, "We're going to be friends" (117). For each of them, in their first encounter, there is a bit of guardedness, since Lily has never really known an African-American male of her own age, nor has Zach really known a white female of his age before this encounter. Southern people in that time and place were severely segregated. While August had told Lily enough about Zach for her to know he was African-American before they met, August had not mentioned anything to Zach about Lily being white, and he is shocked to discover this. Lily is shocked, because of her own prejudiced upbringing, to find Zach a very handsome young man. In addition to the physical attraction Lily feels, even though she is not really conscious of this, Zach has a sense of humor and knowledge of the world that she does not, for example, about music.
Their friendship deepens through their working together in the honey house, as they get to know what they have in common and how they are different. Both are missing a parent, Lily, her mother, and Zach, his father. Each of them has ambition well beyond the expectations of their upbringing. Zach wants to become a lawyer and Lily to become a writer. In many ways, Zach is far more sophisticated than Lily, having an interest in the politics of the day, for example. Lily has led a fairly sheltered life until this point.
In spite of the racial divide, as time goes on, Lily and Zach's physical attraction to one another increases greatly, and combined with the deepening friendship, what they feel is love. Lily says,
It seems like I as now thinking about Zach forty minutes out of every hour (133).
Zach is more guarded, saying,
Lily, I like you better than any girl I've ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me for even looking at girls like you (135).
When Zach ends up in jail for having stood with his friends against a group of white racists in an encounter in town, Lily visits him and gains an insight into the underlying connection between them, saying,
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them? (184)
Zach's imprisonment leads to May's suicide, and this places a burden of guilt upon Zach, as well as a new anger at racial injustice. He becomes more politicized, while Lily would like to go back to the more "innocent" times before all of this happened. But finally, in a scene in Chapter 11, Zach and Lily have their first kiss, and Zach vows that he will change the world so that he and Lily can be together. He gives her his dog tags as a symbol of his pledge.
As the book ends, Zach is attending the white high school, and he and Lily remain together. What will happen in the future is not clear, but we hope that they can remain together always because in spite of all the superficial factors that suggest these two should not be together, they are a good match, both intelligent, goodhearted people who have experienced pain and loss that have made them understand and love one another. A more cynical person might say this was puppy love, but I like to picture them together still, with some children and some beehives.
What drew Lily and Zach together in The Secret Life of Bees?
You might find it useful to re-read Chapter Seven, which is the first time when Zach and Lily actually meet and get to know each other. What is interesting is the immediate way in which Lily feels drawn to Zach and how handsome she finds him. Lily recalls the way that she used to laugh at jokes her white friends used to make about black people and their appearance, but note how seeing Zach challenges her former ideas about black people and beauty:
At my school they made fun of coloured people's lips and noses. I myself had laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in. Now I wished I could pen a letter to my school to be read at opening assembly that would tell them how wrong we'd all been. You should see Zachary Taylor, I'd say.
So, not only is Lily struck by how handsome Zach is, at the same time let us remember that Zach is the only person who is a similar age to Lily, and therefore it seems clear that they would spend lots of time together and be able to interact in a way that Lily is unable to with others. I think it is important as well that Zach, like Lily, is shown to be an outcast of white society in the way that he is arrested for being black. Lily feels a certain amount of sympathy with him in this respect, as she feels that she is an outcast from white society too in the way that she has run away and also through the memories she has of her mother. These reasons all serve to bring them together and create lots of mutual sympathy between them.
In The Secret Life of Bees, why are Lily and Zach drawn to each other?
Arguably, Lily shows herself to be still a child at the end of this novel when her father leaves her, driving away, out of her life. Even though she recognises that she will cease to have any contact with him in the future, she still clings to what she calls "the goodness of imagination" which gives her hope that one day she will actually have contact with T. Ray and he will show love towards her. Note how she phrases this in the final chapter:
Sometimes I imagine a package will come from him at Christmastime, not the same old sweater-socks-pajama routine but something really inspired, like a fourteen-karat-gold charm bracelet, and in his cared he will write, "Love, T. Ray." He will use the word "love," and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything.
Lily is still a child therefore in the way that she believes in the "goodness of imagination" and how this gives her courage and confidence to believe that she will still be able to heal the ruptured relationship with her father and he will be able to express love towards his daughter. Clearly, this is an impossible dream, as T. Ray is the kind of character who is never going to be able to do this, and Lily hasn't embraced the cold, hard realism of life yet to its full extent.
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