Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradise, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender, Race, and Power
Community
Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma
Change vs. Tradition
God, Holiness, and Faith
Exclusion
Summary
Analysis
It is December 1974. Patricia, a teacher, sits at home preparing decorations for the school’s Christmas play, which all of Ruby annually comes together to support. Her father, Roger Best, told her over dinner that he plans to add a gas station to his growing list of business ventures. He had wanted to be a doctor, but no medical school would accept him, and Patricia wonders if her mother Delia might still be alive if Roger had succeeded in his goal.
Unlike the women who featured in previous chapters, Patricia is not a member of the Convent community. Instead, she is deeply connected to the town of Ruby. She works at the school, educating Ruby’s youth, and takes part in the tradition of the Christmas play.
Themes
Patricia, who goes by “Pat,” has been working on a collection of family trees to document the history of Ruby’s citizens. She struggles because the women in town refuse to tell her what she wants to know, and Ruby lacks the records to grant Pat the objective truth she seeks. She wonders especially about the abundance of women with no family names, whose only identities come from the men they marry. Despite the obstacles, Pat pores over records of the nine families who founded Haven: the Blackhorses, the Morgans, the Pooles, the Fleetwoods, the Beauchamps, the Catos, the Floods, and two branches of the Dupreses. All of these families have descendants still alive and prominent in Ruby, and the offhand conversations of these relatives are Pat’s most valuable sources of information.
Pat’s dedication to archiving Ruby’s history indicates that she cares about the community, but also that she refuses to take its traditions at face value, instead trying to learn their origins. She would prefer textual records, but in their absence relies on oral history, which emphasizes the significance of oral history in small communities, especially those populated by marginalized groups who histories are not officially recognized. Even less accessible than Ruby’s general history are the histories of the community’s nameless women. The emphasis on family lineage in Pat’s research highlights how a woman giving up her family name to take her husband’s erases that woman’s history and identity.
Themes
An event that looms in the history of Ruby is “the Disallowing.” When the founding families sought aid at another all-Black town called Fairly, the light-skinned townspeople rejected them for being too dark. The rejection unified the families in its inconceivable insult, and their shared anger still shapes Ruby today. The “horror” that Ruby’s townspeople feel toward white people is powerful but “abstract,” while their hatred for the light-skinned Black people who rejected them is concrete.
Along the journey to Ruby, the founding families encountered an orphan baby. The DuPreses took her in and named her Lone, and she now works as the town’s midwife. The Fleetwoods blame Lone for the disabilities of Sweetie and Jeff’s children, so Arnette, who is pregnant, intends to give birth in a hospital. Pat looks over K.D.’s branch of his family tree and wonders about his mother, Ruby, and his father, an army buddy of the Morgan twins who no one knew well.
Though Ruby was a member of the town’s most prominent family, and though the town itself is named after her, no one seems to know much about the woman herself. She is defined by her male relatives, and even her husband was simply an extension of her brother.
Themes
Get the entire Paradise LitChart as a printable PDF.
In her records, Pat marks each member of the nine families with “8-R” for “eight-rock,” a deep level in coal mines that reflects their dark skin. After the end of slavery, light-skinned emancipated people and their descendants found some degree of influence and privilege while the “eight-rock” people continued to suffer. Dark-skinned Black people realized the most pressing division they faced was not white and Black, but light-skinned and dark-skinned. The “sign of racial purity” they had once been proud of became shameful.
Pat’s recollection of the history of eight-rock people suggests that the Disallowing is such an important part of Ruby’s cultural identity because it represents the broader issue of colorism in America. The founding fathers of Haven and Ruby witnessed the exclusion of dark-skinned Black Americans from the progress of light-skinned Black Americans, and the shame and resentment at this injustice still shapes how the people of Ruby view the outside world.
Themes
Part of Zechariah Morgan’s devotion to Haven was his conviction that the “eight-rock” families should never be “devalued by the impure.” Pat thinks this obsession with purity and insulation should have ended when the men left town to serve in World War II. However, the racism and colorism they witnessed from fellow soldiers only strengthened their desire to keep Ruby isolated, even as fights for civil rights gained traction throughout the nation. Pat’s father Roger is the only one of the New Fathers to ever break the unspoken “blood rule.” More recently, Menus Jury tried to marry a light-skinned outsider, but the town leaders forced him to send her away, leading to his descent into alcoholism.
In response to the racism and colorism of the rest of the country, the citizens of Ruby have constructed a culture of colorism in which dark skin is a symbol of racial purity. The desire to keep Ruby racially pure is linked with the desire to keep the town safe from outside oppression, and both schools of thought lead the townspeople to keep Ruby isolated. While this “blood rule” supposedly protects the community, it also damages individuals like Menus, who must choose between pursuing their individual goals and being accepted by their community.
Themes
On the back of her own family’s page, Pat writes that the townspeople hate her family because Pat’s mother Delia had light skin, which she passed to Pat and which Pat passed to Billie Delia, thus making them Ruby’s “first visible glitch.” She then writes to her mother, who died in childbirth. Pat explains that the women tried to save Delia’s life despite the town’s disdain for the Bests. None of the women could drive, and Roger was out of town, so they had to beg the men to take Delia for the Convent to help, and all the men refused.
Ruby’s obsession with racial purity allows the community to define people who were born into the community as “outsiders.” Pat serves her community and is interested in her history, but her light skin prevents the community from truly accepting her. The men seem to be those responsible for upholding the pride in legacy and racial purity; meanwhile, the town’s women quickly put those notions aside when Delia was in danger.
Themes
Pat mourns for her stillborn sister, who died with Delia. She images how they could have stood together against the town’s judgment, and she acknowledges that she married her late husband Billy Cato partly out of love and partly because his skin was so dark. He died so soon after the wedding that people call Pat “Miss Best” instead of “Mrs. Cato.” Delia and Ruby Morgan are the only two people who ever died within Ruby’s town limits, which lets the town believe they are blessed, and which also severely hurts Roger Best’s mortuary business. Pat reflects on the fractions of Delia’s life story she knows, and then turns her thoughts to her tumultuous relationship with Billie Delia.
Pat grew up without her mother or her sister, the only people who would have understood the difficulty of being light skinned in Ruby. Pat wishes that she had had these women in her life to be outsiders with her so that she would not have had to bear the town’s ostracization alone. Thinking of her mother makes Pat think of Billie Delia, her daughter, which reflects how her experience as a daughter influences her experience as a mother.
Themes
Pat believes in Billie Delia’s reputation as a deceitful, promiscuous girl, and after she caught Billie Delia at the Oven with Apollo and Brood Poole, Pat beat Billie Delia so violently that she ran away to stay at the Convent. Pat doesn’t entirely understand her feelings about her daughter, but she recognizes that Billie Delia is in some way a liability to Pat’s desire to prove her own value. She believes that if Billie Delia was eight-rock, the town would not grant such weight to the time a three-year-old Billie Delia publicly took off her underwear. Pat doesn’t know “whether she ha[s] defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.”
The discrimination Pat has faced for not being eight-rock manifests as intergenerational trauma, as she mistreats Billie Delia in an attempt to protect both Billie Delia and herself from their peers’ judgment. By validating the rumors about Billie Delia, Pat also perpetuates the sexist notion of shaming female sexuality against her own daughter. Pat wants Billie Delia to conform to patriarchal standards of womanhood so that Billie Delia will be safe, but the pressure she puts on Billie Delia undermines their relationship. Pat recognizes that she struggles to prioritize Billie Delia over her own reputation in Ruby.
Themes
Nathan DuPres, who is considered the oldest man in Ruby, gives a speech before the Christmas play about a dream he had. In the dream, a Cheyenne man approaches Nathan in a beautiful bean row and explains that the crop is useless because its flowers are the wrong color. He resolves that a crop is strong when it is understood, but when people misunderstand a crop, it can break and bloody them.
The presence of a Cheyenne man in Nathan’s dream speaks to the history of the displaced Indigenous peoples who owned the land where Ruby is built. His warning about the flowers’ color echoes the town’s obsession with skin color and racial purity, but his insistence that a crop can only serve the community if it is understood challenges the ignorance of the town leaders. If the leaders continue to ignore the young people’s calls for change, the people who might have helped Ruby will tear it down.
Themes
Reverend Misner steps out into the hallway and finds Pat. She suspects he will ask for a donation, since he has been trying in vain to collect for a legal defense of four young Black protesters unjustly arrested in another town. Instead, he asks if she or Billie Delia could provide any insight into a conflict at the Pooles’ house. Pat coldly refuses, insisting that Ruby people keep to themselves and accusing Misner of radicalizing the town’s youth. As the play begins, Misner points out that the children want to learn more than Pat teaches them, including information about their African roots. When Pat asserts that she has no interest in Africa, Misner tells her that “isolation kills generations.” Pat takes this to mean that Misner doubts the townspeople’s love for their children, but he clarifies that he thinks their smothering, controlling love is the problem.
Misner’s arrival in Ruby has not stopped his activism elsewhere. However, the citizens of Ruby are uninterested in helping Black people outside of their own town. Pat’s dismissal of Africa recalls Soane’s earlier confusion about the young people’s interest in Pan-Africanism, and her disdain for Misner’s progressivism reveals that Pat participates in the same systems of isolation and exclusion that she hates. Misner observes that Ruby’s generational divide is caused as much by love as by hate, suggesting that the townspeople’s desire to protect their children mirrors the men’s desire to protect the women: it becomes a justification for control.
Themes
Misner gives up arguing with Pat and watches the play. He realizes the nativity scene has been altered, casting seven children as Mary and Josephs and one as a Wise Man, so that the innkeeper’s rejection of Mary and Joseph mirrors the Disallowing. Misner watches, growing bitter about how ordinary Black Americans have quietly fought racism for generations while Ruby—and Haven it before it—staunchly pretends it can be apolitical.
The Disallowing was not only a fundamental moment in the founding of Haven—it also remains a central memory in the collective consciousness of Ruby. The community has kept the insult of the Disallowing alive, reviving it year after year, as a reminder why Ruby must remain isolated from the outside world.
Themes
Later, Pat wonders why she defended Ruby so fervently, and also why the play has only seven Mary and Josephs. When she was a child, the play had eight children in the roles, reflecting the nine founding families and excluding the racially impure Cato line. She doesn’t know which family of the remaining eight was cut, and when she asks Roger, he refuses to believe that any ill will exists in the play or Ruby at large. That night, as Pat ponders her own exclusion of Misner and the futility of Ruby’s bloodlines, she burns all her records.
The exclusion of a new family from the status of the founders exemplifies how, without outsiders to exclude and scapegoat, the citizens of Ruby are beginning to turn on one another. Pat’s confrontation with Misner has fractured her hope for the community, and it has opened her eyes (to some extent) about how she is complicit in Ruby’s tradition of exclusion. Her decision to burn the papers is at once a moment of defeat, as she gives up on her passion, and a moment of rebellion, as she challenges the importance of Ruby’s bloodlines.
Themes
