The town of Ruby is steeped in traditions, and burgeoning challenges to those traditions incite conflict. This conflict centers around The Oven. The Oven is the heart of Ruby, a remnant of the town’s predecessor Haven that serves as a community space. The town’s forefathers engraved a message on the Oven that has faded with time, so it simply reads “…the Furrow of His Brow.” Tradition holds that the original engraving read “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” but Ruby’s younger generation argue that the intended message is “Be the Furrow of His Brow.” They believe that “Beware the Furrow” implies cowardice and inaction, which men who survived slavery would not praise as virtues.
The young people’s desire for change in Ruby echoes the changes occurring throughout America. The main action of Ruby takes place in the early 1970s, after the Civil Rights Movement empowered Black people across the United States to confront white supremacy directly. Ruby was founded to “outsmart” white people by avoiding them entirely, and the young people find this mission as cowardly as the message “Beware the Furrow of His Brow.” But the older townspeople—and especially the men—feel that the younger generation’s desire for change is an insult to their ancestors and a threat to the community leaders’ power. Reverend Misner is a civil rights activist who has moved to Ruby, and his outsider’s perspective allows him to see that Ruby stands on the precipice of change. At the end of the book, that change arrives: for the first time in over 20 years, someone dies within the town borders. This death disproves the townspeople’s belief that God has blessed Ruby with immortality. Tradition has stayed alive for years because its enforcers, the town elders, have stayed alive, and they are living embodiments of the past. With the blessing of immortality broken, Ruby can no longer hide from the future. Misner witnesses this and comes to a fundamental realization on the nature of change: there is some tragedy in the loss of traditions that united a community for generations, but communities must change and adapt, or else they will cease to survive.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Change vs. Tradition ThemeTracker
Change vs. Tradition Quotes in Paradise
As new fathers, who had fought the world, they could not (would not) be less than the Old Fathers who had outfoxed it; who had not let danger or natural evil keep them from cutting Haven out of mud and who knew enough to seal their triumph with that priority. An Oven. […] the Old Fathers did that first: put most of their strength into constructing the huge, flawlessly designed Oven that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done.
Unique and isolated, his was a town justifiably pleased with itself. It neither had nor needed a jail. No criminals had ever come from his town. And the one or two people who acted up, humiliated their families or threatened the town’s view of itself were taken good care of. Certainly there wasn’t a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town and the reasons, he thought, were clear. From the beginning its people were free and protected. A sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and […] beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.
However disgusted both were, K.D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store to end up in Arnold Fleetwood’s pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K.D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in [the] line […]. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction.
“No ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. […] No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that. No ex-slave––”
Deacon Morgan cut him off. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about. Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex-lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their way.”
Having caught Reverend Misner’s eyes, the boy was firm. “He was born in slavery times, sir; he was a slave, wasn’t he?”
“Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”
[Steward] wondered if that generation––Misner’s and K.D.’s––would have to be sacrificed to get to the next one. The grand- and great-grandchildren who could be trained, honed as his own father and grandfather had down for Steward’s generation. No breaks there; no slack cut then. Expectations were high and met. Nobody took more responsibility for their behavior than those good men.
The women nodded when the men took the Oven apart, packed, moved, and reassembled it. But privately they resented the truck space given over to it––rather than a few more sacks of seed, rather than shoats or even a child’s crib. Resented also the hours spent putting it back together […]. Oh, how the men loved putting it back together; how proud it had made them, how devoted. A good thing, [Soane] thought, as far as it went, but it went too far. A utility became a shrine […].
[…] Pulliam had just sprayed [poison] over everything[.] Over the heads of men finding it so hard to fight their instincts to control what they could and crunch what they could not; in the hearts of women tirelessly taming the predator; in the faces of children not yet recovered from the blow to their esteem upon learning that adults would not regard them as humans until they mated; of the bride and groom frozen there, desperate for this public bonding to dilute their private shame. Misner knew that Pulliam’s words were a widening of the war he had declared on Misner’s activities: tempting the youth to step outside the wall, outside the town limits, shepherding them, forcing them to transgress, to think of themselves as civil warriors.
[Arnette] believed she loved [K.D] absolutely because he was all she knew about her self––which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him. Except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law.
Now, it seemed, the glacial wariness they once confined to strangers more and more was directed toward each other. Had he contributed to it? […] Even acknowledging his part in the town’s unraveling, Misner was dissatisfied. Why such stubbornness, such venom against asserting rights, claiming a wider role in the affairs of black people? They, of all people, […] understood the mechanisms of wresting power. Didn’t they?
Over and over and with the least provocation they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks […]. But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? […] As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates.
[Pat] didn’t seem to trust these Ruby hardheads with the future any more than he did, but neither did she encourage change. […]
“You know better than anybody how smart these young people are. Better than anybody…” His voice trailed off […].
“You think what I teach them isn’t good enough?”
Had she read his mind? “Of course it’s good. It’s just not enough. The world is big, and we’re part of that bigness. They want to know about Africa––“
“Oh, please, Reverend. Don’t go sentimental on me.”
“If you cut yourself off from the roots, you’ll wither.”
“Roots that ignore the branches turn to termite dust.”
Whether they be the first or the last, representing the oldest black families or the newest, the best of the tradition or the most pathetic, they had ended up betraying it all. They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him. They think they are protecting their wives and children, when in fact they are maiming them. And when the maimed children ask for help, they look elsewhere for the cause. […] How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. Soon Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret.
