Paradise

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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 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.

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.