Paradise begins with nine unnamed men attacking a Convent, which houses a group of women the men believe to be sinful. As the men see the women escaping, they fire their guns.
The story then moves back in time to chronicle how the women came to the Convent and why the men have come to kill them. The first woman to move to the Convent is Mavis, whose husband Frank has abused her to the point of constant self-doubt and paranoia. After she accidentally kills her infant children by leaving them in the car, she flees Frank and finds her way to the Convent, which stands outside the all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma.
A middle-aged woman named Connie lives in the Convent with an old woman she calls Mother, and they welcome Mavis to stay. Connie herself came to the Convent as a child, when Mother (a nun named Mary Magna) took Connie from the streets of Brazil and raised her in the Convent, which formerly served as a residential school for Native American girls. Connie has since been utterly devoted to Mary Magna.
Gigi arrives next. She’s a confident and sensual woman who left home in search of a legendary rock formation. The rock formation, which her ex-lover described to her, allegedly resembles a couple having sex, but Gigi finds no evidence the rock formation exists. She comes to Ruby after hearing of a different legend, and though she does not find that either, she chooses to stay at the Convent, much to Mavis’s dismay.
Next to arrive is Seneca, who was abandoned by her teen mother as a child and has since tried to appease everyone in her life to keep them from leaving. Like Mavis, Seneca leaves an abusive partner, but she only finds the strength to leave after her boyfriend is sent to prison and his mother tells her to leave. Seneca then enters a degrading relationship with a wealthy older woman. After the woman dismisses her, Seneca hitchhikes around the country until she ends up at the Convent.
The final woman to come to the Convent is Pallas, a wealthy high schooler who runs away from home with her older boyfriend Carlos. The couple goes to stay with Pallas’s estranged mother Dee Dee, but Pallas runs away again when she discovers that Dee Dee and Carlos are having an affair. While on the run, Pallas is assaulted by a group of boys and hides in a body of water. She falls ill and is taken to a hospital, where an employee from Ruby named Billie Delia recognizes her and sends her to the Convent.
For several years, the Convent’s community is disjointed, which only worsens when Mary Magna dies and the Convent’s leader Connie falls into a deep depression; Connie’s hatred for her healing power of “stepping in,” which pious Connie believes to be unholy, only worsens her mental health. Eventually, though, Connie decides the women need to come together in order to heal their individual traumas, and her leadership brings the Convent together as a tight-knit, supportive community.
Interweaved with the women’s arrivals is the story of Ruby’s founding and the mounting conflict that arises between the town’s older and younger generations. Ruby is founded by nine Black families who come from Haven, another all-Black town founded by Zechariah Morgan. Haven was founded after a group of Black travelers were rejected by other Black towns for being too dark-skinned, and that exclusion made Haven––and eventually Ruby––determined to preserve the town’s isolation.
After Haven started to crumble, Zechariah’s twin grandsons Steward and Deek led nine families to found a new town, bringing with them the Oven that served as Haven’s town center. The patriarchs of these founding families exert their control over Ruby for years, but as Black people around the country start uniting for civil rights in the 1960s, Ruby’s young people begin to push against the isolationism of their elders. The older generation takes this as a disrespect to tradition, and conflicts break out on both town-wide and more personal scales.
These conflicts come to a head at the Oven. Zechariah Morgan engraved a phrase on the Oven that has since faded, leaving only the words “…the Furrow of His Brow.” Tradition maintains that the intended message is “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” but the young people find this cowardly and passive. They insist that the initial engraving was really “Be the Furrow of His Brow.”
Supporting the young people is Reverend Misner, a civil rights activist who is new to town, and his girlfriend Anna Flood. On the opposing side are the conservative Reverend Pulliam and the Morgan brothers. Many of the older women of Ruby are unsure which side to support, including Dovey and Soane Morgan, the wives of Steward and Deek. Pat Best, a schoolteacher and the mother of Billie Delia, has been shunned her entire life because her mother was a light-skinned outsider, yet she still rejects the young people’s call for change and defends Ruby’s traditions to Reverend Misner.
The leaders of Ruby seek a scapegoat for the conflicts in town, and they decide to blame the Convent women. Lone DuPres, Ruby’s elderly midwife, overhears nine men planning to attack the Convent. Among these men are the Morgan twins and their nephew K.D. Deek Morgan formerly had an affair with Connie, and his internalized shame about it largely fuels his hatred for the her. Steward, on the other hand, is simply outraged at the women’s defiance of what he believes a woman should be and how a woman should act.
Lone tries to rally the townspeople against the men, but they are unwilling to take immediate action, giving the nine men enough time to break into the Convent and murder its inhabitants. Deek tries to stop Steward from shooting Connie, and when Steward shoots her anyway, the bond between the brothers severs.
After the massacre, Ruby sees the first death within the town limits since its founding: an infant named Save-Marie, one of four severely ill children of Jeff Fleetwood, who was one of the nine attackers. This death marks the future’s arrival in Ruby, as the town can no longer remain stuck in the past. The bodies of the women disappear from the Convent, and when Misner and Anna Flood go to investigate, they sense some kind of doorway on the property. In a series of short scenes, the women appear to their family members. Connie sits somewhere called Paradise, watching a boat of new arrivals come to do the endless work they were all created for.
