Ruby

Ephram walks over to his mother’s grave. Otha Jennings’s coffin contains a collection of her favorite items, since her remains were not salvageable from the fire that burned the segregated ward of Kindred psychiatric hospital to the ground.

The narrative flashes back to Otha’s childhood in Baltimore. She grows up in a family who never knew slavery. At 17, she meets Reverend Jennings on her way to church. Within days, they are married, and Otha gives up her family’s dream of a college education. By the time she gives birth to Ephram, the reverend is regularly beating her and shaming her in front of his congregation. They struggle financially, and Otha takes on a job at Miss Barbara’s bridal shop to make ends meet. Shortly afterward she starts finding disturbing items around the house, including a voodoo doll stuck with a pin and a foul-smelling red velvet bag. One night, she finds a bloody sheet hidden in the outhouse and knows that something was killed on it. That night, she secretly follows her husband into the pine woods. Crouched behind a tree, she watches him minister to a group of men she recognizes from church as they gather around a fire.

The reverend speaks about how white men have both God and the Devil at their beck and call, thanks to the KKK’s satanic rituals. He blames the existence of racist white men on women, who “carry evil inside them like a disease” (194). Six small girls are brought into the circle. As one man kills a calf, the others begin to sexually assault the girls. Otha turns to run, but she is caught and knocked unconscious by the men. Upon waking the next morning, she experiences a mental-health crisis and shows up to the church picnic naked.

At Dearing psychiatric hospital, the reverend tells the front desk that Otha tried to drown her children. She is held under inhumane conditions, shunted between filthy rooms with other Black patients. The psychiatrists at Dearing inject her with experimental medications that cause hallucinations. She only receives one visit from her family before her death.

In the Bell yard in the present day, Ruby is once again transforming into the chinaberry tree. Chauncy appears, yanking her from her reverie. She doesn’t want to sleep with him, but she is “well trained in not following her wants” (207). The Dyboù enters Chauncy’s body as Ruby lies on the ground. When she doesn’t comply immediately with its demands, Chauncy drags her inside and beats her. As he prepares to assault Ruby, Ephram appears at the door with a carton of chocolate ice cream. Chauncy composes himself and coolly lies that he came to the house to apologize. Ruby backs up his lie, and Ephram grudgingly lets Chauncy go. As he walks back toward town, the Dyboù within Chauncy decides he will carry on Reverend Jennings’s legacy.

Ruby and Ephram sit together in the yard. Ruby feels like “a used thing […] nothing” (212) until she sees a flicker of respect in Ephram’s eyes. The sight makes Ruby remember her worth as a person. She leans up and kisses Ephram.

By the time they break their kiss, rain has washed most of the red powder off Ruby’s doorstep. Ephram gets a brush and bucket to scrub away the rest. Then he carries her over the threshold as the old crow caws out a warning. Ruby murmurs, “Shut up, Maggie” (214) before catching a glimpse of Reverend Jennings’s ghost in the doorway.

Celia returns home after Junie’s funeral. She is ashamed that Ephram left the service and missed the reception. The fact that it’s Ruby who is stealing Ephram away compounds her shame.

Celia knows about Ruby’s childhood. When she was 12, Celia followed her father, the reverend, into the woods and witnessed him raping Ruby at the pit fire. Unable to accept his guilt, she turned on Ruby, convincing herself that the little girl was a minion of the Devil and had “dragged [the reverend] into hellfire” (219).

Celia resolves to try and save Ruby’s soul. If she doesn’t succeed, then she will get Ruby committed to Dearing.

The pine trees in the Liberty woods have watched men acting out dark rituals around the fire for hundreds of years. At first it was only white men who performed the rituals. Enslaved people hid in the shadows and learned “the source of the white man’s might” (221). They intermixed traditional African folk practices and made them their own. The Dyboù is the spirit of Reverend Jennings and has been wandering the woods for 37 years because his soul was bound to the earth by a KKK curse cast in the moments before his lynching.

The narrative flashes back to Omar Jennings’s boyhood in Jessup, Maryland. His father abuses alcohol and beats him, and his mother verbally abuses and slaps him, except for when he manages to bring food home. At 13, Omar murders his father in a staged accident near a plantation. Shortly afterward, his mother rapes him. They begin an incestuous relationship. Omar runs the household for two years, until his mother falls pregnant. Mrs. Jennings tries to kick her son out of the house and move another man in, so he murders her with an axe. He buries both of their bodies with lodestones on their graves to stop their souls from rising. For the next three years before leaving Jessup, Omar runs the household, presiding over his little sisters and sexually abusing the middle child, 10-year-old Betty.