Paradise takes place in Ruby, an all-Black town controlled by domineering patriarchal systems, and the characters’ experiences with race and gender are inextricably linked. The story moves through time to explore the background of the book’s beginning: nine of the town’s most influential men murder the residents of the Convent, where independent women have formed a small community. This violence is the culmination of the subtler, less physical forms of violence that Ruby’s patriarchy constantly inflicts upon the women in the town. The townspeople sexualize and ostracize young Billie Delia following an innocent childhood incident, and they accuse the midwife Lone of witchcraft because of her herbal remedies and spirituality, for instance. Twin brothers Steward and Deek Morgan, the unofficial leaders of Ruby, share a childhood memory of 19 delicate and beautiful Black ladies giggling in pastel sundresses as they pose for pictures. The brothers hold this image as the ideal of Black femininity: fragile, soft, and existing only to be looked at. When women stray from this ideal, the brothers and other men feel the need to correct or eliminate them. The attack on the Convent is the women’s punishment for straying from the men’s perception of what a woman should be, but it is also preventative: the men believe that the women’s deviant behavior is spreading through Ruby, and they believe that killing the women will protect the town.
Ruby is an isolated and insular town, consisting almost entirely of descendants of the original founding families. When the nine men arrive at the Convent, one man reflects that without the threat of white people or outsiders, Ruby’s women are “free and protected,” which keeps them virtuous. This notion that Black women require protection carries throughout the novel, and the men’s commitment to that protection comes from the fact that being able to defend oneself and one’s loved ones is a privilege not afforded to Black men outside of all-Black towns. This notion of protecting Ruby’s women highlights the connection Paradise draws between racism and sexism. As the men seek to protect the women from racist abuse and to overcome the emasculating humiliations of racism, they become controlling and narrow-minded about the roles that women should fill.
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Gender, Race, and Power 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.
Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.
God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.
Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack. A grown woman who could not cross the country. Could not make a plan that accommodated more than twenty minutes. […] Too rattle-minded to open a car’s window so babies could breathe. […] Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.
She had acquiesced when he asked her to join him in prayer. Bowed her head, closed her eyes, but when she faced him with a quiet “Amen,” he felt as though his relationship with the God he spoke to was vague or too new, while hers was superior, ancient, and completely sealed.
It was the I-give woman serving up her breasts like two baked Alaskas on a platter that took all the kick out of looking in the boy’s eyes. Gigi watched him battle his stare and lose every time. He said his name was K.D. and tried hard to enjoy her face as much as her cleavage when he talked. It was a struggle she expected, rose to and took pleasure in––normally. But the picture she had wakened to an hour earlier spoiled it.
[Elder] never got the sight of that whiteman’s fist in that colored woman’s face out of his mind. Whatever he felt about her trade, he thought about her, prayed for her till the end of his life. […] Steward liked that story, but it unnerved him to know it was based on the defense of and prayers for a whore. He did not sympathize with the whitemen, but he could see their point, could even feel the adrenaline, imagining the fist was his own.
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 […].
[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.
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.
The women in the Convent were for [Steward] a flaunting parody of the nineteen Negro ladies of his and his brother’s youthful memory and perfect understanding. They were the degradation of that moment they’d shared of sunlit skin and verbena. They, with their mindless giggling, outraged the dulcet tones, the tinkling in the merry and welcoming laughter of the nineteen ladies who, scheduled to live forever in pastel shaded dreams, were now doomed to extinction by this new and obscene breed of female. He could not abide them for […] desecrating the vision that carried him and his brother through a war, that imbued their marriages and strengthened their efforts to build a town where the vision could flourish.
