The Secret Life of Bees characters

Appears from the start

A lonely fourteen-year-old white girl on a peach farm in South Carolina in 1964. She is haunted by a childhood memory of her mother's death, in which she believes she was somehow to blame, and she lives under the harsh, loveless rule of her father. Bright and imaginative, she clings to a few keepsakes of her mother and aches to know who her mother really was.

Appears from the start

Lily's father, a gruff, bitter peach farmer who shows his daughter little warmth and metes out cold punishments. Hardened and quick-tempered, he offers Lily no comfort about her dead mother and dismisses her longing to understand the past.

Appears from the start

The Owens family's Black housekeeper and the closest thing Lily has to a mother. Warm, plainspoken, and stubborn, she has helped raise Lily and stands up for herself in a town where doing so is dangerous, setting events in motion when she tries to claim her rights as a citizen.

Appears from the start

Lily's mother, who died when Lily was very young. Lily knows her only through a few treasured objects and fragments of memory, and much of her yearning is to piece together who this woman was and whether she loved her.

First appears in chapter 4

The eldest of three Black sisters who keep bees and sell honey in the town of Tiburon. Wise, calm, and deeply kind, she takes Lily and Rosaleen into her home, teaches Lily the craft of beekeeping, and becomes a steadying, motherly presence.

First appears in chapter 4

One of August's sisters, a proud, cello-playing schoolteacher. Reserved and initially wary of the white girl who has appeared in their household, she keeps her distance from Lily at first.

First appears in chapter 4

The most fragile of the Boatwright sisters, who feels the sorrows of the world so intensely that any grief can overwhelm her. Gentle and childlike, she copes through small rituals and needs the constant care of her sisters.

First appears in chapter 6

A serious, ambitious Black teenager who works alongside August with the bees and dreams of becoming a lawyer. He and Lily become friends, and their growing closeness is fraught in a segregated South that forbids it.