Little Bee: Chapter Four Summary & Analysis

Early in the morning of Andrew’s funeral, before Little Bee arrives at her front door, Sarah watches the world through her window and thinks about how futile it seems. She listens to radio commentators talk about the stock exchange and finds herself saying out loud, “Yes, but I have lost my husband.” Sarah knows she should feel pain for Andrew’s death, but so far she has not felt anything. She considers fleeing the suburbs, taking Charlie and her credit card and disappearing on a plane until her life and grief disappear in the distance. But then Little Bee knocks on her door. Sarah and Little Bee stare at each other for a moment, and then Sarah brings her inside. Little Bee looks exhausted. Sarah thought she was dead.

After exchanging a few sentences, Sarah leaves Little Bee in the living room, grabs her phone, and calls Lawrence, her lover. Sarah tells Lawrence she feels conflicted but does not mention Little Bee. She tells him that she keeps thinking about that day on the beach with Africa, but Lawrence tells her she needs to move on. Sarah can hear him swearing at his child in the background. Lawrence tells Sarah to just get through the funeral, and hangs up.

Sarah stares at her face in the bathroom mirror, disappointed to see no marks of grief in it. She wonders if she lost something “so fundamental” that day in Nigeria that any additional loss—a finger, a husband—seems inconsequential. Sarah rubs her eyes hard so that at least they’ll be reddened at the funeral and it will look as if she’s been crying. Going back to the living room, Sarah finds Little Bee still sitting on the couch. Little Bee tells her she had no other place to go, no one else she knew in the country. The undertaker arrives and prepares to take the coffin, so Sarah sits with Charlie in the garden. Charlie asks if Little Bee is a “goody” but Sarah does not answer.

Sarah privately frets about superficial details: whether her clothes are appropriately dark for a funeral, whether 10 pounds is a suitable donation for the collection plate at church. Andrew always had a “strong opinion about life in a civilized country,” and Sarah realizes that such ordinary decisions will be difficult without him. As she looks at Charlie in the garden in his Batman costume and Little Bee in the living room, she realizes “life had broken through.” Her curated identity, her “careful set of defenses against nature” have failed her and allowed reality to come and sit in her living room.

Standing outside next to the hearse and the limo, Sarah thinks about how slowly Andrew’s death happened, stretched over the two years since Nigeria. With the “full clarity of horror,” Sarah recalls that Andrew used to be a “passionate, loving, brilliant man.” They’d met just after Andrew was fired from a newspaper job over his unmoving principles, and the instant attraction between them felt like a lightning strike. That attraction began to fade when Charlie was born, and that day in Nigeria only quickened its collapse. Sarah cannot cry for Andrew because his fading happened so slowly. And she cannot cry for herself because she deserves no sympathy.

After the funeral, someone drives Sarah, Little Bee, and Charlie home. Sarah and Charlie talk about ordinary things, and there seems to be something horrible for both of them in the ordinariness of it all. After lunch, Little Bee plays with Charlie in the garden, helping him hunt bad guys. They form a quick and easy bond. Sarah sits in the kitchen while her mother and sister putter around the house, trying to help. Sarah realizes that she can run and hide from a memory, perhaps, but not a person. She will need to face Little Bee and face what happened in Nigeria. Sarah stares at her stump of a finger, her eyes wet with tears.

Two years before, Sarah and Andrew took a holiday in Nigeria, though they shouldn’t have. They didn’t know that an oil war was in progress there, and they didn’t realize that the Foreign Office’s advisory against traveling to Nigeria was serious. When a tourist company sent Sarah a free trip to Nigeria, her independent streak jumped at the chance to be unusual. Not far from the beach where Sarah and Andrew were staying and “being unconventional,” Little Bee was fleeing her burning village. Sarah’s missing finger itches as she thinks about it.

After Little Bee and Batman come in and clean up—Sarah gives Little Bee new clothes—Sarah makes drinks for herself and Little Bee. They sit together in the living room. Sarah asks Little Bee to tell her everything about her escape. Little Bee begins her story: after the men burn her village, she runs through the jungle for six days. Nkiruka is able to follow her trail and catch up with her, though that means anyone else will be able to as well. Nkiruka decides they should change their names to hide their ethnicity. She names herself Kindness. A bee lands on a flower between them, which Little Bee had not noticed before. She names herself Little Bee.

Since the men are hunting them, the sisters hide in the jungle until sunset. The oil companies do not want any survivors left alive to testify to all the killings, so mercenaries hunt all the women and children who fled. During the night, Little Bee and Kindness sneak down to the shore to wash their bleeding feet. In the morning the sisters hear Sarah and Andrew on the beach. Andrew seems nervous about being away from the hotel compound. Little Bee and Kindness are amused by the two white people, until they hear dogs barking behind them in the jungle.

A Nigerian hotel guard armed with a rifle jogs up to Sarah and Andrew and asks them to return to the hotel; it’s not safe on the beach. Sarah and Andrew are both irritated by him and resistant. The dogs’ barking grows nearer. Little Bee and Kindness are terrified. The hotel guard points his rifle toward the jungle. Andrew thinks the guard is putting on a show, looking for a bribe, so he starts arguing with Sarah about how much to bribe the man. The guard pays them no heed, staring at the tree tops, and demands that they return to the hotel. He fires three shots into the air, giving the dogs and whoever is with them brief pause.

Little Bee and Kindness can hear the mercenaries’ machetes cutting through the brush close by, so they break their cover and run out to the beach to meet Andrew and Sarah. Little Bee ignores the guard and Andrew, looking straight at Sarah, and begs her to take them to the hotel compound. The hunters will kill them otherwise. Sarah cannot fathom why someone would kill a little girl. Andrew exclaims that the situation is a “classic Nigeria scam” and starts to pull Sarah back in the direction of the hotel. Little Bee and Kindness follow after. When the hotel guard threatens them with his rifle, the sisters exclaim that a bullet is better death than the “oil company’s men” would give them. The guard shakes with fear.

Five dogs emerge from the jungle, followed by six men, and sprint across the beach. When the guard shoots the closest dog in the head, the other dogs turn and immediately start devouring its corpse. The hunters approach. Most of them have machetes. One draws a bow. The leader has a large, festering wound in his neck. When the leader sees Kindness, he grins, points at her, and fingers his nipples in sexual gesture. The hotel guard threatens to shoot them, but the leader tells him he cannot kill all of them quickly enough. Little Bee and Kindness move behind Andrew and Sarah.

The hunters are passing around what looks like a bottle of wine. One of them has a full erection. Sarah tells Andrew to give the hunters whatever they want. The leader steps up to Sarah and pulls off her beach wrap, exposing her small green bikini underneath. In the retelling, Sarah says that she cannot believe that she wore such a thing into the middle of an oil war. The leader steps close to Sarah and runs his finger across her bare shoulder. As one hunter passes the bottle that looked like wine, Sarah sees an eyeball floating in the red liquid. Andrew offers the man money, and the leader takes it without looking at it and passes it to the men behind him. The leader says that he wants the girls.

Sarah tells the leader he can’t have Little Bee and Nkiruka; if he tries to take the girls, the hotel guard will shoot him. The leader looks genuinely surprised at the refusal. He asks Sarah where she is from, and when she tells him they are from Kingston he remarks that he knows the place; he “studied mechanical engineering there.” The leader stabs his machete through the hotel guard’s throat and lets his body drop to the sand. Kindness mutters a prayer behind Sarah. The leader points at Kindness and announces that she will die next. Sarah pleads for the leader to leave the girls alone, but Andrew tries to dissuade her, saying that “this is not our affair.”

The killer laughs at a white man claiming that something is not his business, since white people have always wanted his money, his oil, his land. He stares at Andrew and asks if Andrew wants to save the girls. Mentally, Sarah recalls that the last column Andrew wrote before they left for their trip mourned the fact that “we are a self-interested society.” Andrew is silent, but Sarah tells the leader they will give him anything he wants. The leader points to the hole in his neck and says he’ll die within two days. The only thing he wants is for Andrew to cut off his middle finger with the leader’s machete, since white men “been giving me this finger all my life.” If Andrew does that, he’ll let the girls live.

Andrew curls his hands into fists while the killer takes his machete by the blade and holds the handle toward Andrew. He states that if Andrew refuses, he will have to listen to the sisters die. Sarah tells Andrew he must do it, but Andrew can’t summon the courage, offering several weak excuses. The killer shrugs and turns away, stating that Andrew made his choice. However, Sarah kneels, takes the machete, and chops off her own finger instead. Sarah thinks they will all die anyway, and the act is easier than she would’ve expected. Andrew is horrified and tries to hug Sarah, but she shoves him away and clutches the bleeding stump. The leader nods, takes Sarah’s finger from the sand, and announces that Little Bee will live, but Kindness will die because of Andrew’s failure.

At some point in Sarah’s retelling of this incident, Little Bee fell asleep, but Sarah picked up the narration in her own memory. She calls Lawrence again and asks him to come over, but he tells her that he’s stuck home with his kids. When Sarah tells Lawrence about Little Bee, he becomes angry. Lawrence insists that Little Bee must be some kind of criminal and that Sarah should call the police to take her away. Sarah resists, however. She doesn’t think Little Bee is dangerous in any way, and she wants to help her this time.

Instead, Sarah hangs up on Lawrence and wanders up to Charlie’s room. While she watches him sleep, she reflects on her happy childhood and healthy family. None of them had extramarital affairs; it just wasn’t done. At least that was the image. Sarah knew Andrew was a mistake within the first month of their marriage. They married quickly, to spite her mother, and were both so stubborn they wore each other down.

Sarah thinks back to the aftermath of her vacation with Andrew: she doesn’t sleep for a week after returning from Nigeria. On the plane home, she thinks how odd it is that the world simply continues without her. She feels like her childhood has ended. Holding her hand aloft to ease the throbbing pain where her finger should be, Sarah decides that she will never let Andrew touch the wound for the rest of her life. When they get home, she resumes her work at the magazine, resumes her affair with Lawrence, and focuses on keeping her life moving along. But back in the present, staring into the mirror and seeing dark bags beneath her eyes, Sarah feels as if her “mask is finally cracking.”