Little Bee

The second chapter begins, also in the first person, from the perspective of Sarah. It is 2007, she remembers, when Little Bee begins living with her and her family, after the death of her husband. Her 4-year-old son wears only her Batman costume at all times. He is haunted by Batman’s enemies, and he responds only to the name “Batman.” They were all “exiles from reality […] refugees from [themselves]” that summer (21).

Sarah is Andrew O’Rourke’s wife. Andrew “killed himself by hanging” five days after Little Bee called their house. His wife sees his death as “a refuge,” a place “where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself” (22). Five days after Andrew’s death, Little Bee arrived: “After a journey of five thousand miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but in time for his funeral” (22).

Together, Little Bee, Sarah, and her son walk to the church for the funeral. Sarah remembers feeling “dizzy and foolish” (23) while Little Bee comforts her, helps her cross the distance. Sarah’s son Charlie, dressed as Batman, seems excited at the way they stop traffic, the way the vicar’s outfit matches his own. Suddenly, he asks her: “Where’s Daddy?” (24). She tries to imagine how to explain Andrew’s “depression and guilt” (24) to their son. She remembers wondering how “an ordinary phone call, from a skinny African girl” (24) might have precipitated his death.

Andrew’s depression began two years earlier, the day he and Sarah met Little Bee on the beach in Nigeria. “A steel machete” (25) on that beach cut off Sarah’s finger, she tells the reader, leaving her unable to type the letters E, D, or C. Sarah enters into a slow, distracted retelling of the morning of Little Bee’s phone call. She knew as she heard Andrew decline guilt that he did not believe those words: “All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault” (26).

To distract him, from the phone call and from the opinion column on war in the Middle East that he was trying to complete, Sarah pulls him into the bedroom to make love. He cries quietly. Their son walks in on this scene. He has pooped in his Batman costume. As Sarah cleans up and prepares for the day, Andrew eats breakfast. Sarah and Charlie leave him, silent, lying naked on the bed. His tendency to be “lost for words” had begun the day they met Little Bee.

She describes her morning at work at Nixie, a women’s magazine. Even before she hears about Andrew, she remembers feeling distracted, wondering what he might have been trying to say. At 10:25 a.m., less than an hour after she arrives, two policemen arrive at her office. When she arrives at the reception desk to greet them, they wear “no expression” (37), even as she offers them coffee or tea.

They apologize to her and do not say about what. Catching their glance at her lack of thumb, Sarah repeatedly begins to explain that it is not “a big deal,” even though she can “feel it” (38). The younger of the two officers explains to Sarah that her “husband was found unconscious” (38) at their home and was pronounced dead at 9:33 a.m. Sarah looks at her phone, at a message she had ignored earlier from Andrew. It reads: “SO SORRY” (39).

Sarah remembers that “the silence lasted all week” (39), wherever she went. In the church, then, she cannot explain something that she “hadn’t even accepted” (39) herself to her son. She trembles during the Eulogy. Charlie continues to ask for his father during the service, and Sarah explains, whispering, that Andrew is “in a really nice bit of heaven this morning” (40).

As they bury him at the cemetery, Sarah continues to work to explain heaven to her son. But when Charlie realizes that his father is in the coffin, he screams: “GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!” (42). He runs and then falls into the grave, on top of the coffin, and this another mourner screams; Sarah thinks “it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence” (42).

With the confidence of Batman, Charlie screams and beats against the coffin; “he wouldn’t give up” (42). The other mourners are “paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death” (42). It is Little Bee who climbs into the grave, picks a fighting Charlie up, and hands him to someone outside the grave. Little Bee tries to comfort Sarah. The two women try “to smile at each other” (44). Andrew had been a columnist at the Times, and later in the week his editor sends a cutting of his obituary to her “in a heavy cream envelope” (44). 

Little Bee’s voice, again, begins Chapter 3 with a description of “the things [she] would have to explain to the girls from back home” (45) about Britain. In Britain, she explains, horror “is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it” (45). In Nigeria, however, “horror is a disease and we are sick with it” (45).

Although she is a refugee, “there is no refuge” (45) from this horror. The passage to Britain, in a ship, was terrifying, as was the detention center, despite the charity boxes sent to it. “Now,” she explains, “the horror can speak the Queen’s English,” which is how “we can speak now of sanctuary and refuge” (46). In the detention center, Little Bee explains, she learned to “work out how [she] would kill [herself]” (46) in any new place. She fears moments when “the men” can “come suddenly” (47).

Her imagination indulged in visions of killer herself in the center, out in the English countryside, and eventually even at home in Nigeria. Eventually, this was her motivation to start eating: for strength, so that she could kill herself at the right time. Slowly, she “realized that [she] was carrying two cargoes,” one of horror and one of hope”: she “had killed [herself] back to life” (49).

Little Bee claims that “once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror” (50). This helps when, as Yevette explains, she leaves the center and becomes what “[d]ey call […] bein a illegal immigrant,” which is a “second kind of freedom” (50).

She remembers waiting for the taxi driver outside of the detention center. Yevette wondered if the taxi driver “soun cute on de phone” (53), and the girls begin to describe their ideal man. When the taxi pulls up, Little Bee hears Queen’s “We Are the Champions” playing on its stereo, which reminds her of a detention center guard who used to play the song. Little Bee tries to say “something that showed [the driver] we were not refugees,” so she says “Hello, I see that you are a cock” (56). He responds: “Don’t they teach you monkeys any manners in the jungle?” (56) and then speeds away.

Two men working in the fields stop the girls. They ask if they’ve “escaped” (59) from the detention center. Although the men poke some fun at the girls, one does finally admit his shock: “[H]ow can they release you without papers?” (61). He continues, saying that it is “bloody typical” of their government, which “doesn’t care about anyone” (61).

The men offer for the girls to stay, which makes one, a girl in a yellow sari, sob. Without regular seasonal workers, the farm’s dormitory is empty. Entering the chaos of the barn reminds Little Bee of “how it was when Nkiruka and [she] finally left our village back home” (64). She sinks into memories of the screaming and chaos in the village they left behind.

In the dormitory, Yevette and Little Bee share their plans. Yevette is worried when she sees Andrew O’Rourke’s ID, warning Little Bee that “dis is a white man” (69) she plans to meet up with. She urges Little Bee to go to London with her, where “for sure [they] gonna find some of [her] pipple” (69). But she will not tell Yevette the story of their relationship, beyond the fact that they met on the beach in the company of Andrew’s wife.

But it is hard for Yevette, too, to tell the story of her arrival in the United Kingdom. At home, she explains, “yu get on de wrong side of de politics,” and “dey gonna make yu suffah” (71). Because “pipple nivver believe dat about” Jamaica, she told her asylum interviewer that “if he arrange to get me release from dat place, he can do what he want wid me” (71).

Both girls begin to cry, but they also begin to laugh. Yevette asks, “What we gonna do wid our-selves?” (72). She explains that, although the girls have been released, they have not been granted asylum: The agent she compromised herself for could not accomplish that task. Little Bee is filled with fear because “[they] can’t do anything without papers” (73). But Yevette is sure that if they had tried to accomplish freedom in the detention center, “dere is only one place where proper procedure ends, an dat is de-por-tay-SHUN” (73).

The girl who will not say her name, who wears the green shoes, begins to scream as chickens enter the dormitory. She is hallucinating, saying the name of her youngest daughter. Little Bee comforts the nameless girl.

That evening, the farmer’s wife brings them food. She is “a kind woman” (76). Although she is surprised, she does not ask questions when they ask for a fifth plate, on which they save a serving for the daughter of the girl who does not have a name.

After dinner, in her sleep, Little Bee dreams of her village “before the men came” (77). There, “everything was happiness and singing” (77). The fields on which she played, though, were on top of an oil field, which men would soon fight over. “This is the trouble with all happiness,” she explains, that “all of it is built on top of something that men want” (78).

When she wakes up from her dream, the nameless woman has hanged herself from one of the long chains in the dormitory. Rather than wake up the other girls, Little Bee opens up the nameless woman’s bag and reads the official documents with her story written on it. Just like her own story, this woman’s begins with “The men came and they…” (79). She fantasizes about taking the documents and winning her own asylum case with them. This, she decides, would be immoral.

Little Bee leaves the dormitory immediately and walks into the field. Leaving Yevette is difficult, but when “you are a refugee, when death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited” (80). Refugees lack a flag; they “are not a nation” and “cannot stay together” (80) for long. She walks, following the light of London from a distance, until the gray morning rises and she comes upon an “incredible” (81) road.

After the fields, she comes into neighborhoods with clean, orderly houses and cars. She is hungry, and although her legs ache, Little Bee is “amazed by each new wonder” (83) in London. She knows that, if she follows the river, she will arrive in Kingston.

She is overwhelmed because “a million people [are] all around [her]” (84). If retelling the story to girls at home, not the “you” who she might have seen in the street that first day, she would need to “explain to them how it was possible to be drowning in a river of people” (84) but still feel “so very, very alone” (85).