I couldn’t help being reminded of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while reading The Secret Life of Bees. It is the story of a poor, ignorant white girl and how her world view is changed by her black companion. Our hero is young and ignorant, which may be why this is The Secret Life of Bees instead of The Secret Lives of Bees. Set in the South in the early 1960s the story is about race, ignorance, hatred, and features the usual cast of bigoted white redneck men and noble well-educated black women. As in Dances With Wolves, our…