Little Bee: Chapter One Summary & Analysis

Little Bee often wishes she was a “British pound coin instead of an African girl,” because people are always happy to see a pound coin. A coin can travel easily between people and even between countries as a result of “globalization,” to wherever it thinks it will be safest. An African girl gets held up by immigration authorities, but a coin can pass right on through. Also, the coin has the Queen’s face on it and speaks “the Queen’s English”—the grammar and voice that carries so much weight and authority in England.

In the two years that Little Bee lives in an immigration detention center in Essex, England, she teaches herself to speak “the Queen’s English,” because the older women tell her the only way to avoid deportation is to be pretty or well-spoken. On the day she leaves the detention center, a detention officer hands her a transport voucher and points to a phone on the wall where she can call a cab. Three other girls are in line to use it before her. The hallway with the phone “was dirty but it smelled clean,” because the officers soaked it with bleach. Little Bee thinks “that is a good trick.” An officer at his desk reads a newspaper with a topless girl on the centerfold, which Little Bee knows would shock the “girls back home.”

The detention officer stares at the topless girl in the newspaper, though Little Bee thinks he ought to be watching the girls in line for the telephone instead, in case they run. However, the detention center is simply letting the girls go, which Little Bee does not understand. Two years before, when she was 14, Little Bee arrived in England without papers, so they threw her in detention with the adults. However, during the day, the men were mixed in with the women, and the older men watched her with “hungry eyes,” so Little Bee made herself as undesirable as possible, wearing loose clothes, refusing to bathe, and strapping a cotton band around her breasts to flatten them. Once a week, at night in her cell, Little Bee took off her heavy boots and painted her toenails red to remember that she is “alive underneath everything.

Little Bee’s older sister Nkiruka “became a woman” under the African sun; Little Bee becomes a woman beneath fluorescent lights in an underground detention center where it is cold regardless of season. Little Bee feels that, though an African girl is somewhere deep inside her still, she was “reborn […] in captivity” and emerged as something unnatural, a strange hybrid of the developing and developed world. She looks like a disheveled African girl in cast-off clothes but speaks like the “leader column of The Times.” She admits, “I would cross the street to avoid me.” Little Bee is lonely as a refugee, feeling as if she belongs nowhere. Her life seems colored “gray.”

On the morning of Little Bee’s release, the officers give her and the three other girls all of their possessions in clear plastic bags. Little Bee has gray socks, gray briefs, an English dictionary, and a business card and UK driver’s license that belong to a white man named Andrew O’Rourke, whom Little Bee met on a beach once. Holding her plastic bag, Little Bee steps into the line of girls at the telephone. A tall pretty Jamaican woman with a pink scarf and plucked eyebrows is speaking into the phone, trying to explain where she is to the cab driver, though she doesn’t know the name of the detention center. The girl behind her is extraordinarily beautiful, wearing a yellow sari, but she has nothing in her bag and she never speaks.

The third girl in line, wearing green trainers, is neither pretty nor well-spoken but her bag is full of official documents that detail her story and journey to the UK. Her story starts like every woman’s story in the detention center: “The-men-came-and-they…” The Jamaican woman asks her the name of the detention center and Little Bee reads “Black Hill Immigration Removal” off of a plaque on the wall. The Jamaican woman is impressed that she can read and tells the man on the phone. He calls her “scum” and hangs up immediately. Neither the Jamaican woman nor Little Bee understand what this word means.

The girl in the yellow sari steps up to the phone and begins whispering into it in a foreign language. The Jamaican woman taps her on the forehead and tells her she must speak English. The girl in the sari slowly recites a memorized sentence stating that she wants to go to England. In frustration, the Jamaican woman takes the phone to speak herself, but realizes the other girl has been speaking to a dial tone. The Jamaican woman hands the phone to Little Bee to try calling someone. Little Bee calls the cab company and tells the dispatcher that she needs a cab for four women at the detention center, but they are cleaners, not refugees. They need to go to Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey. They’ll pay cash on arrival.

Next, Little Bee calls Andrew O’Rourke at the number on his business card. When he picks up, Little Bee introduces herself as the girl he met on the beach two years ago in Nigeria. She tells him that she is in England now, and she is coming to Andrew and Sarah’s house because she does not know anyone else in the country. Andrew first thinks she is a scammer, then acts angry, insisting that that day on the beach “happened a long time ago.” Little Bee tells him she is coming either way, she just wanted to let him know ahead of time.

When Little Bee hangs up the phone, she tells the girls that a cab is coming for them and they should wait outside. The Jamaican woman introduces herself as Yevette, and thinks Little Bee is a silly name. The other two girls remain silent. As they walk past the security desk, the detention officer reading the magazine opens his mouth as if to say something. Little Bee thinks he is about to tell them there was a mistake, and wonders if they should flee. Instead, he pauses, then wishes them good luck.

Little Bee opens the door, but the sudden smell of wet grass and fresh air frightens her—she has not been outdoors in all the time that she was detained. Yevette is impatient to leave and gives Little Bee a shove out the door, knocking her on the ground. Both women laugh at her “glorious” entrance into the free world. As the girls walk, Little Bee reaches under her shirt and unwraps the cotton band from her breasts, letting it fall to the dirt. The “whole world was fresh and new and bright.”