57 pages • 1 hour read
Ruby
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Book 2, Chapter 11-Book 3, Chapter 15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2: “Two Bits” - Book 3: “Revelations”
Book 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Ruby eats breakfast as Ephram determinedly cleans the filthy house. Partway through, Celia appears at the door and tries to drag him to church, shouting out rancorous Bible verses. Though Ephram seems deflated when she leaves, he continues cleaning.
Ruby thinks of the first man who raped her after her return to Liberty, an old friend of her grandfather who quickly spread word of her vulnerability around town. Ruby leaves her door unlocked and has a regular stream of rapists, from churchgoers to boys from the local high school. Lately, Ruby has enjoyed the encounters. In the moments of the act, the men seem to need her—it is “the only power she ha[s] ever known on earth” (123).
As Ruby watches Ephram scrub her floor, she feels a mounting panic and vomits on the bed. She is certain that Ephram will use the pretense of cleaning her up to rape her, a thought that calms her in its familiarity. Instead, he lets her clean herself. As he continues scrubbing, he hums a tune that drives away the homeless spirits who have long occupied her room.
Ruby approaches Ephram and tries to seduce him. When he gently rejects her, Ruby is stung by his pity. She calls him an anti-gay slur and runs outside, but he follows and gently catches her by the wrist. Keenly aware of her own deterioration, Ruby laments the young, beautiful version of herself who first arrived in New York in 1950.
Book 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Shortly after arriving in New York, Ruby takes up sex work. Because she has “never fully entered the house of her body” (128), it’s easy to do. One night, three years into her stay, she is invited to a local lesbian club, Page Three, where she begins seeing female clients. She feels safer with older lesbians, considering them “the best men she’[s] ever known” (131). She starts dating Abby Millhouse, a white lesbian and a survivor of a near-fatal attack by two cops known as Batman and Robin. After a week of dating, Ruby moves in with Abby.
When the police raid Page Three one night, Ruby protects Abby by performing oral sex on one of the officers. Afterward, she shares a cigarette with Abby but is offended when Abby pauses to wipe the cigarette off before putting it in her mouth.
After fighting with Abby, Ruby steps into the shower. She recalls the Friends’ Club, where Reverend Jennings began taking her when her father was ill, visits that increased after he died. At the Friends’ Club, Ruby was violently raped by countless white men. The madam, Miss Barbara, explained that her clients were willing to do things to Black girls that they “simply [couldn’t] bring themselves to do with a white girl” (141). During the assaults, Ruby escaped her body by imagining herself becoming a chinaberry tree. Her first visit to the Friends’ Club lasted two weeks, and after Papa Bell died the visits grew longer and more frequent.
When Ruby emerges from the shower, she remembers what living with Abby has briefly allowed her to forget: She is nothing but a “whore.” A week later, Ruby leaves Abby for a wealthier woman.
Book 2, Chapter 13 Summary
In the present, Ruby starts to cry. She tells Ephram that she has wasted her youth and isn’t the woman she used to be. Ephram leads her back into the house, where he reassures her that he’s interested in the woman she will become. Ruby feels a rush of hope and gratitude.
There’s a knock at the door. Four women from the church are outside: Righteous Polk, Tressie Renfolk, and Supra and Verde Rankin. On Celia’s instruction, they intend to forcibly baptize Ruby in Lake Marion. Ephram turns them away, but Supra threatens that the baptism must be done by Sunday, lest Ruby’s evil “buckle the weave of the town” (147). After the women leave, Ruby walks through the pine woods to visit Maggie’s grave.
Throughout the day, 20 other people visit the Bell house to watch Ephram cleaning. Come evening, the spirits of the dead children leave Ruby’s body, peacefully rather than painfully. The last spirit to leave is the ghost of the baby Ruby birthed at the Friends’ Club when she was 14. Eight months into her pregnancy, Ruby was brutally beaten and raped by a john, which sent her into an early labor. She gave birth in her room at the brothel. Moments after the baby girl was born, she died in the hands of a stranger.
In the present, Ruby buries the spirits of her children. She knows that from now on, they’ll sleep in the safety of the earth, though they will still visit her.
When Ruby returns to her house, it is entirely cleaned. Ephram draws Ruby a bath and gives her a sheet to cover up with as he helps her wash her hair. Ruby’s hair whispers to him, making him realize that the spirit world has always been talking to him. Ephram absorbs Ruby’s feelings through her hair, from the grief of her losses to the pain of her rapes and the exhilaration of her life in New York. By the time he is finished, he understands her experience of womanhood.
Book 3, Chapter 14 Summary
In the pine forest, the Dyboù watches a circle of men gathered around a fire, sacrificing a living black cat. He selects the strongest man—whom the reader will later learn is Chauncy—and enters his body, then guides him into Ruby’s home through her unlocked door. Chauncy spills a mixture of ox blood, molasses, and mandrake powder in the foyer. The Dyboù knows this concoction will weaken the resolve of anyone who steps in it. He guides Chauncy’s body back to his own home, resolving to “ride him again soon” (159).
Book 3, Chapter 15 Summary
Ephram awakes to Gubber Samuels outside Ruby’s door. Gubber warns Ephram that Celia has been elected Church Mother and given a fiery sermon, claiming that the Devil is using Ruby to get to Ephram. The churchgoers are prepared to run him and Ruby out of town. Gubber advises Ephram not to miss Junie Rankin’s funeral in the afternoon.
Ephram recalls his childhood friendship with Gubber. Ephram was the victim of frequent childhood bullying, and Gubber was the only one who comforted him after his mother was taken to Dearing. When they were teenagers, they began secretly kissing in the Jenningses’ barn house. One day they were caught by Reverend Jennings, who beat Ephram bloody and never looked him in the eyes again.
Though the reverend forbade him to ever see Gubber again, Ephram often snuck out to meet him the following summer. One day they happened upon Reverend Jennings’s body hanging from a tree. His penis had been severed and stuffed in his own mouth. After that, Gubber turned on Ephram and began bullying him along with the other kids.
As the day dawns, Ephram reenters Ruby’s house, unwittingly tracking the powder mixture inside.
Book 2, Chapter 11-Book 3, Chapter 15 Analysis
In these chapters, Bond fills in the details of Ruby’s abuse. As a child, she was sold into commercial sexual exploitation by Reverend Jennings and subjected to countless brutal sexual assaults. These assaults are the cause of her trauma and low self-worth and are the reason she expects Ephram to turn on her at any moment. Since the death of her grandfather, no man has ever shown her kindness without ulterior motives.
Racism and sexism play a large role in Ruby’s experiences at the Friends’ Club. Johns feel more comfortable abusing Black girls than white girls because they associate Blackness with being inherently “bad.” This allows them to shift the guilt of their crimes onto Ruby instead.
During the worst of her abuse, Ruby used a fantasy of turning into a tree as an escape, a habit that contextualizes her connection to the woods in the present. She wants to be as strong and grounded as the chinaberry tree, which she associates with positive and innocent childhood memories. The sense of self she has lost due to her abuse seemingly resides within the chinaberry’s branches.
The revelation about who was behind Ruby’s trauma plays out in parallel with Celia’s rise to power in the church. Sections told from Celia’s perspective illuminate her view of Ruby as a manipulative seductress. She victim-blames Honey, Ruby, and Neva for their own rapes. Celia’s moral schema dictates that churchgoing men, especially members of the clergy, are good by default. To avoid breaking her worldview, she must convince herself that the women they assaulted deserved it due to a moral failure. It’s the same line of thinking espoused by the predators at Miss Barbara’s.
Through the characters of Reverend Jennings and Chauncy, Bond highlights that the decision to judge morality along religious lines is shortsighted. Men like Chauncy can easily keep up appearances by attending church during the day, then retreat into the woods at night to enact black-magic rituals. Maintaining a Christian facade allows them to divert suspicion, as it’s assumed by default that they are good men. The church holds tremendous sway in Liberty, and evil people can harness this to their advantage.
In an ironic moment, Celia and her church friends show up to stop Ruby from “[buckling] the weave” of the town (147). Because Ruby is written in the third-person omniscient style, readers are privy to information that not all characters know. The In-His-Name Holiness congregation presumably doesn’t know that the town’s weave has already been corrupted by men within their own ranks. The women of the church misdirect their outrage onto Ruby, blaming her mental turmoil on possession by evil, brought on by her sinful actions. They believe that “curing” her is as simple as converting her to a good churchgoer, once again displaying a reductive view of morality.
Bond also explores the theme of sexuality further in this section. Both Ruby and Ephram have had relationships with same-sex partners. Both might privately identify as bisexual, but in Liberty they must suppress this part of their identity to protect themselves from intolerance toward gay people. Ironically, the most open expressions of anti-gay sentiment in the novel so far have come from men who are rapists and abusers, like the reverend and Chauncy. Anti-gay rhetoric comes from the same clergy that shelters pedophilic rapists.
The spirit of the Dyboù works through the men of the town, possessing Chauncy. Chauncy’s assaults on Ruby are a continuation of a long cycle of sexual violence. The Dyboù uses his body to enact black-magic rituals meant to further Ruby’s suffering. The powder he spreads in her home symbolizes the way that the trauma of her past threatens to destroy any happiness she’s able to find in the present.
Ephram continues to be a supportive and patient presence in Ruby’s life, but her trauma complicates the progress of their relationship. She has so deeply internalized the idea that she is unlovable that she doesn’t know how to connect with him other than through sex. She continually tries to seduce him as he gently rebuffs her. When Ephram washes Ruby’s hair, he connects with her on a deeply empathetic level that is more intimate than any of the sexual experiences either of them have had. His support helps Ruby find a safe space for her ghost children to rest, symbolizing how their bond is slowly helping her undo the effects of her trauma.
Through Ruby’s memories of New York, Bond explores the way racism manifests in supposedly progressive Northern society. In New York, Ruby has access to high society and can rub elbows with influential white people in a way that is not possible in Texas. Certain Black figures, like James Baldwin and Dorothy Dandridge, even occupy positions of high social esteem. Yet as an ordinary Black woman, Ruby still has no power or agency. Every luxury she is afforded comes at the price of her bodily autonomy. Though her sex work in New York is dressed in a shiny facade, it is a continuation of the race- and sex-based violence she has known since she was a little girl. She still mistakes sex for power, and her betrayal of Abby shows that she has a pattern of self-sabotaging loving relationships because she thinks of herself as a “whore.”
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