Paradise

Reverend Senior Pulliam gives a scathing sermon at K.D. and Arnette’s wedding about how love should be taken seriously and earned. Reverend Misner disagrees with this outlook and is furious. When his turn comes to officiate, he holds up a cross in silence. K.D. wants to get the wedding over with; after years, Gigi never returned his affections, so he is finally marrying Arnette. This marriage promises to end the animosity between the families about the baby who died. Billie Delia dislikes K.D. Billie has an unfair reputation for promiscuity because she publicly removed her panties to ride a horse when she was a child. Billie has also spent time at the Convent after fighting with her mother.

Reverend Misner’s silent act has reignited the very unrest the wedding sought to quell. The Convent women are invited to the wedding reception at Soane’s house. Gigi, Seneca, Mavis, and the new girl, Pallas Truelove, come without Connie. Dressed immodestly and dancing provocatively, their presence unsettles the other guests. Reverend Misner laments that the people of Ruby have become increasingly intolerant, disagreeable, and obsessive over the past. The Convent women are asked to leave. On the drive home, Gigi and Mavis argue about the upset they caused at the wedding, and the argument turns into a fistfight on the side of the road. When they get home, Mavis reflects on how she has changed since she left home, now able to defend herself and capable of cooking a good meal.

Sixteen-year-old Pallas ran away with her adult boyfriend Carlos, a sculptor and janitor at her school. They stayed with her mother, named Divine (a.k.a. “Dee Dee”). When Dee and Carlos started an affair, Pallas ran away again. Seneca brings Pallas to Connie, who is drinking in the basement cellar. Sitting on Connie’s lap, the previously speechless Pallas lets loose her tears and shares what happened to her. When she ran away the second time, she hid in a lake from some boys who had likely sexually assaulted her. Wandering, she hitchhiked with a truckful of Indigenous men and a woman with a baby. Later, the clinic closed before she could get help, but Billie Delia met her and took her to the Convent.

That night, Arnette shows up at the Convent, violent and looking for her dead baby. She had given birth there, but it had died shortly after. In the chaos, Arnette bites Pallas in the neck. Once she leaves, the women head to bed. 

Patricia Best Cato, a teacher at the school, is preparing for the school’s Christmas play. Pat has been constructing Ruby family trees. Nine original families traveled to Haven: the Blackhorses, Morgans, Pooles, Fleetwoods, Beauchamps, Catos, Floods, and two DuPres families. Others accompanied them or joined along the way, like the orphan Lone DuPres, found by the travelers as a baby. Patricia ponders Zechariah Morgan’s name, whose first name was originally “Coffee.” Patricia labels the original nine families with the symbol “8-R” (“eight-rock, a deep, deep level in the coal mines”) (193) to connote their very dark skin. The constant rejections on their journey—what they called “the Disallowing”— were likely due to colorism from light-skinned Black people. When the New Fathers and their families moved to Ruby, they enforced 8-rock purity. Pat’s father, Roger Best, was the first to break the rule when he married her light-skinned mother, Delia.

Pat has a tense relationship with her daughter, Billie Delia Cato, who she thinks is promiscuous. Pat imagines the town would have been more forgiving of Billie’s horse incident had she been 8-rock. Nathan DuPres delivers the opening words before the Christmas play. He speaks about a dreamlike encounter with a disappearing Indigenous man in a field.

The Nativity play mirrors the story of Haven. The children, arranged in seven couples, are turned away from an inn. During the play, Reverend Misner asks Pat if he could speak with Billie Delia about a conflict among the Pooles; Pat declines. They discuss the generational rift in Ruby. Reverend Misner has misgivings about the town, and he wonders which families have been denied representation in the nativity play, as there are seven couples rather than nine. He talks to Pat about the importance of having a real home. At the play’s end, Anna comes straight for Reverend Misner, irritated that Pat—the only other eligible woman for him—might infringe on her courtship with Misner.

Afterward, Pat also wonders why there were only seven pairs in the play. She knows the first missing family is the Catos, whose line got cut after her husband, Billy, died. She asks her father, Roger, about the seven pairs, but he isn’t much help. Pat knows there is more colorism and discrimination beneath this issue too. Without thinking, she tosses the family histories into the fire.