Characterization

Lily is the main character of the book, "The Secret Life of Bees" written by Sue Monk Kidd and she is created to have a very dark past, but still come across as a very simple and innocent girl.  When she was only 4 or 5 years old, she dealt with the loss of her mother not once, but twice.  Lily's mother first left her and her father to go live with a woman she grew up with.  Her mother, Deborah was never happy with her marriage mainly because she didn't want to marry T-Ray, but she did so anyway because she was pregnant with Lily.  The second time Lily loses her mother is a few months later.  Deborah realized just how much she loved her daughter, Lily and that she couldn't continue without her.  Deborah left where she was staying to go home and get Lily.  She tried to avoid T-Ray, but was unsuccessful.  When the fighting was getting very intense, Deborah pulled a gun out of her closet.  T-Ray tried to grab it from her but he dropped it on the floor, the gun landing right in the middle of them.  Lily, still very yound attempted to help her mother by picking up the gun to give it to her.  The next set of events is a blur to Lily and the story that comes from her father, T-Ray can not be trusted. Sometime after Lily picked up the gun, it was fired and with that, her mother was dead.  The idea of shooting her mother was a burden she had to carry with her the rest of her life.  Another thing that made her past so dark was the way her father treated her.  They did not have a relationship that was even remotely close to normal.  She did not call T-Ray dad, daddy or father, but she called him by his first name.  Right after Deborah died, T-Ray hired a nanny, Rosaleen, who becomes the closest thing to a mother she would ever have.  Her father abused her and there was pretty much nothing Lily could do to stop him.  He continuously slapped her and he made her kneel on her hands and knees on grits on the kitchen floor when she did something bad.  When Lily went to live with the Boatwright sisters, although she claimed that her mother was long dead and her father recently died in a tractor incident, she came off as very simple and polite.  Lily is is a very unique character