Ruby, the primary setting of Paradise, is a town dependent on isolation and the exclusion of perceived outsiders. The men who founded Ruby’s predecessor, Haven, walked there with their families. Along the way, they stopped at another all-Black town for shelter, but the residents rejected the travelers for being too dark-skinned. The travelers refer to this event as “the Disallowing,” and it fundamentally shapes the way that Haven––and later Ruby––functions. In response to the insult of the Disallowing, the founders of Haven uphold their dark skin as a source of pride and racial purity, and they become fixated on preserving this purity throughout the generations. Only two people in Ruby ever pursue romance with a light-skinned outsider: Roger Best and Menus Jury. Roger Best marries this outsider and has children with her, leading to the ostracization of his family, while Menus Jury yields to social pressure and breaks up with his light-skinned lover, which severely worsens his unraveling mental health. Reverend Misner, the only Ruby resident who was not born there, struggles against Ruby’s distrust of outsiders as he tries to navigate the community. His outside perspective allows him a broad perspective on the town’s social landscape, and he realizes that the “glacial wariness they once confined to strangers more and more was directed toward each other.” This realization highlights the fatal flaw of Haven and Ruby and summarizes the book’s central claim about the harmful and self-perpetuating nature of exclusion. Paradise suggests that a community built on distrust and exclusion will eventually self-destruct; when the community has successfully excluded all “outsiders,” its dependence on exclusion requires that community to define a new class of outsiders—until all the community members have turned against each other.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Exclusion ThemeTracker
Exclusion Quotes in Paradise
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.
[…] 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.
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.
Who were these women who, like her mother, had only one name? Celeste, Olive, Sorrow, Ivlin, Pansy. Who were these women with generalized last names? Brown, Smith, Rivers, Stone, Jones. Women whose identity rested on the men they married––if marriage applied: a Morgan, a Flood, a Blackhorse, a Poole, a Fleetwood.
[Zechariah] missed witnessing the actual Disallowing; and missed hearing disbelievable words formed in the mouths of men to other men, men like them in all ways but one. Afterwards the people were no longer nine families and some more. They became a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion. Everything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of Haven or Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff out of many.
She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. […] Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. […] But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.
[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.
