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The Color Gray
Throughout the novel, Little Bee refers to anyone she feels she must hide from as “the men.” The men are the embodiment of Little Bee’s fear, representing any person who would wish to do her or people like her harm. After witnessing so much horror and pain, Little Bee feels as if the men could come to take her away at any moment, in any place. Although the men are a constant presence in Little Bee’s mind, they refer to different people at different times including immigration authorities, the oil companies’ mercenaries, the police, or even sexual predators. Regardless of who “the men” refers to at any given time, they always represent a clear threat to Little Bee’s safety and agency, from which she must hide herself or kill herself before they can touch her.
The Men Quotes in Little Bee
The Little Bee quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Men. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter Three
Quotes
They told us we must be disciplined to overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready.
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Chapter Five
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Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. […] When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.
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Chapter Eleven
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I smiled and watched Charlie running away with the children , with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful […] and that is a word I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language.
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Get the entire Little Bee LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Men Symbol Timeline in Little Bee
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Men appears in Little Bee. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter One
...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...
(full context)
Chapter Three
...she will kill herself in any situation with whatever is at hand, in case “ the men come suddenly” to take her away. For her first six months of detention, Little Bee...
(full context)
...a good place for a refugee. That night, Little Bee dreams about her village before the men destroyed it, before they realized an oil field lie beneath it that they wanted to...
(full context)
...than her father or uncle’s broken down cars, which they’d had until “the afternoon when the men came and shot them.”
(full context)
Chapter Four
...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...
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Since the men are hunting them, the sisters hide in the jungle until sunset. The oil companies do...
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Chapter Five
...them know what to do. Little Bee frets about being an illegal immigrant and knows the men could take her at any moment, but Sarah doesn’t believe this. She thinks she could...
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