57 pages • 1 hour read
Ruby
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Book 3, Chapters 21-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3: “Revelations”
Book 3, Chapter 21 Summary
A week after Junie Rankin’s funeral, the rumor mill is abuzz with gossip about Ephram. Townsfolk deliberately pass by the Bell land to report back to Celia on what they see.
Ruby and Ephram are living happily despite the gossip. After Ephram carried her over the threshold, Ruby thought he would expect sex, but he reassured her that he intends to wait until after they are married. Every morning, Ruby takes care of her visiting ghost children and wanders through the woods, communing with nature.
One night Ephram asks Ruby to look into his eyes and accept that he will stay by her side. He asks what she wants, and she replies that she wants to sleep next to him every night and wake up next to him every morning.
A storm breaks out, and rain begins to pour. Outside, the crow screams a warning. Ruby races out of the house clutching Ephram’s pocketknife. The ghost children crowd around her, and she sees the Dyboù lurking close by. Ephram begs Ruby to come inside, but when she explains that a demon is after her babies, he joins her in the yard and asks for the entire story of her life.
Ruby tells Ephram everything, from the reverend’s rituals to Miss Barbara. The narrative flashes back to her youth at Miss Barbara’s, where she befriends the only other Black girl, named Tanny. They comfort one another during the hardest times. One day, a man named Peter Green comes to the Friends’ Club and pays for a room for both girls. Peter says he is the Devil. He calls Ruby his “good little girl” and has her “sit on [his] right, like Jesus” (236). Then he begins strangling Tanny with a wire. When Ruby protests, he puts the wire around her neck and asks if he picked the wrong girl. Ruby says no, and Peter continues his attack on Tanny, raping her and strangling her to death. Racked by grief and guilt, Ruby invites Tanny’s spirit into her body.
When Miss Barbara returns to find a distraught Ruby, she brushes her off, explaining that Peter Green paid extra to kill Tanny. She promises Ruby safety on the condition that she always keeps quiet and does as she is told.
In the present, Ruby asks if Ephram is ready to leave her. Crying, he promises he will never leave and that he will help her bring her children home. Ruby says that all she believes in are the chinaberry tree and the crow, so Ephram offers to build a treehouse for the tarrens up in the chinaberry.
Unbeknownst to Ruby and Ephram, a crowd of churchgoers led by Celia has surreptitiously surrounded the Bell house during her story. As Ephram approaches them, the men tackle him to the ground. Celia begins to pray for his release from “the inciting words of Jezebel” (241). She then turns on Ruby and commands her to accept Jesus. Ruby breaks away and pins Celia down, holding Ephram’s knife to her throat. When Ephram reaches for her wrist to stop her, she accidentally stabs him. Panic erupts, and the congregation carries him away.
Ruby lies unmoving on the ground as the night gives way to day. When she can finally stand, she walks to the chinaberry tree and wraps herself around its trunk.
Book 3, Chapter 22 Summary
After three weeks, Miss P finds Ruby weak but alive by Marion Lake, still holding the knife. She gives Ruby food, water, and a cot at P&K. After five days of recovery, Ruby returns to her house to find the graves of the ghost children empty. Knowing the Dyboù has swallowed them up, she lets out an agonized scream.
Hearing Ruby’s scream, Ephram hurries toward the Bell house. He has recovered from the blood loss and infection caused by his injury and holds no ill will toward Ruby. He offers to help her find her children, but Ruby blames him for letting the women onto his land. When he persists in trying to calm her, Ruby lies and says that she had consensual sex with Chauncy right before their first kiss. She accuses him of setting up a marriage trap just so he could sleep with her and tells him he deserves the ridicule he’s received his whole life. When he persists, she warns that she will kill him if he shows up on her land again.
Ephram stumbles away and runs back home, where Celia has a meal waiting for him. Exhausted and grief-stricken, he crawls into bed, resigned to living out the rest of his life alone.
Book 3, Chapter 23 Summary
Ruby searches desperately for her children, feeling nothing. When Chauncy shows up on a Saturday morning, she knocks him out cold with a shovel. He returns several days later with the Dyboù inside of him, prepared to take Ruby’s soul even if it means killing her. Ruby runs into the woods, where Chauncy tackles her to the ground. Looking up at him, Ruby sees the face of the reverend. She summons her strength to break off a tree branch and uses it to break Chauncy’s arm. Then she passes out.
When Ruby awakens, she is six years old again. After being drugged by the reverend, she has awoken near the pit fire in the woods. A group of men surrounds her, speaking in an unintelligible language. The reverend speaks soothingly to Ruby, but it’s a trick—the things he says destroy her happy memories. The men take off Ruby’s dress and bind her. As she begins to dissociate, they all ejaculate on her. The reverend’s words bind Ruby to him, and she knows that he will own her for the rest of her life.
When the assault is over, Ruby recognizes many of her attackers from town. They are kind-seeming churchgoers and fathers, normal men who hold up “the wheel of the world” that “would crush her every time she rose up to fight” (255).
At Marion Lake, Ephram stands among the In-His-Name congregation waiting to be baptized at Celia’s insistence. He feels like he’s left pieces of himself behind on the walk to the lake. Though the church has never held any magic for him, he’s grateful that it has never hurt him the way Ruby’s love has.
From the forest floor, Ruby reflects on her sins. She reveals that she led other children to the pit fire to be raped and killed. On the night Otha Jennings spied on the ritual, Ruby was the one who pointed her out so the reverend could catch her. She watched Tanny die, and she let the Dyboù take her children. She’s never fought against anything that has happened. The Dyboù is bound to her with an invisible rope, so he can always find her.
The Dyboù emerges from the trees and throws himself on Ruby. She lets him enter her body completely and realizes that she is bound to him by her conviction that the world is an evil and hateful place. As the Dyboù lifts Ruby off the ground, she concentrates on the small “spark of life” remaining in her body (260). It grows until she is strong enough to fight, calling on the nearby trees for help. She shouts that she is “not meant for using” and will never be used again (261). Ruby’s burning spirit incinerates the tie between herself and the Dyboù, and he flees. Ruby thinks of the people she loves. She knows that Ephram will always love her. Above her, the crow wheels in a figure eight.
At Marion Lake, Ephram walks into the water, sidestepping the pastor’s outstretched arms and swimming toward Bell land.
Ruby wishes she had taught her children to fight, but she knows she had to first learn how to herself. Looking up, she sees the tree above her filled with hundreds of perching crows. From behind their wings, the ghost children appear, happy and laughing. Ruby realizes that the Dyboù lied to her—her children were safe the whole time, protected by the crows. With her children in tow, Ruby walks back to her house. As she lights candles and begins to tidy up, she senses Ephram approaching through the pine woods. With tears of joy, she turns to her children, resolving to teach them “to believe in rising” (248).
Book 3, Chapters 21-23 Analysis
As she remembers being assaulted by the “normal men” of Liberty, Ruby despairs at the idea that these men make up “the wheel of the world” (255). Because abuse is so built into the systems that hold up her community, she feels like it’s pointless to fight against them. The men who raped her are husbands, fathers, business owners. They are a more ingrained part of Liberty’s community than she is. The systems they uphold, built on centuries-old racism and sexism, are designed to protect them from the consequences of their actions. People who speak out against them are punished, a pattern that is repeated over and over in Ruby. This crushing sense of inevitability contextualizes why women like Ma Tante, who knew about Ruby’s abuse, didn’t try to stop it.
The Civil Rights Movement playing out in the background of the novel provides a counterexample to this feeling of defeat. The large-scale progress made by protestors proves that fighting back against inequity and cruelty, even at the highest levels of society, can carve out a better future. It takes repeated effort and perseverance in the face of seemingly impossible odds to effect change within a broken system.
Ruby’s flashback shows how the reverend’s abuse took away her innocent happiness and sense of independence. As the men ejaculated on her, she felt her happy memories being carved out by the blind force of their hatred. This further contextualizes why she is so protective over the ghost children, having experienced the brutal end of her own childhood.
The Dyboù draws closer as Ruby continues to reveal her past to Ephram, culminating in her recollection of the brutal rape and murder of Tanny. Miss Barbara allowed Peter Green to kill Tanny because he “bought” her, reflecting the effect of the lingering slavery-era idea that Black women’s bodies are buyable commodities. Ruby’s willingness to share this secret with Ephram illustrates how far she has come in facing up to her trauma and how much she trusts him.
Ruby thinks that her inability to save Tanny means that she is “the bad one” (228), the girl who deserved to die. Her abusers have altered her worldview to the point that, even as an adult, she is unable to see that neither child deserved what happened to them. After Tanny’s death, Ruby dealt with her guilt by taking Tanny’s spirit into her body. Her continued decision to let spirits into her body symbolizes how she carries the untold stories of countless injustices with her. Ruby holds space for these stories while everyone else in Liberty tries to ignore them.
Bond contrasts Ruby’s harrowing memories with the arrival of the congregation at her home. They continue to accuse her of harboring evil, an especially ironic accusation given that Ruby has seen true evil in the form of men like Peter Green, who told her “I am the Devil” (227). During Ephram’s baptism in Marion Lake, the town’s religious posturing is on full display as Verde Rankin and Clara Percy try to out-sing one another while the congregation’s men ogle an attractive woman’s wet dress. Their performative virtue rankles with the knowledge that Celia and others have turned a blind eye on the horrific abuse perpetuated by members of the congregation.
Ruby’s final confrontation with the Dyboù is a defining moment of agency for her. As a child, Ruby was taught by adults to keep quiet and accept anything that was done to her. She came to define herself by the vile labels her abusers placed on her and the idea that she is a bad, worthless person. Despite everything she has been through, she clings to a small spark of hope. Ephram’s love helps her push back on the rhetoric of her abusers. His reassurance that she is worthy of respect and has value beyond her physical body empowers her to finally let go of the idea that she is unlovable.
In the forest, Ruby finally identifies the Dyboù as the spirit of the reverend. She realizes that he is bound to her by their mutual hatred of their “own sinew and bones” (259). In life, Reverend Jennings carried around a burning hatred for the evil parts of the world, and this hatred made him into an evil thing himself. Ruby draws on memories of Maggie and Ephram to fight against this consuming darkness. Thoughts of her loved ones remind her that the world is not a hateful place and allow her to let go of her resentment.
By proclaiming her value and refusing to partake in the Dyboù’s hateful worldview, Ruby banishes him from her life. For the first time since she was six years old, she and her ghost children can rest at ease. There is no forgetting or fully moving past her trauma, but when she stops imbibing “the poison of self-hate” (259), she releases the symbolic lodestone weighing down her spirit. For the first time, she can picture rising into a more joyful future.
Despite the many tragedies of Ruby, the novel ends on a joyful note. Through her healing journey, Ruby has gained the capacity to pass on her learning to her ghost children. She vows to teach them “to stand, to fight, to believe in rising” (248). Although she has no living children, Ruby’s decision to be the kind of loving mother she never had symbolizes a shift in attitude, from resenting the world for its cruelty to loving and treasuring the joyful parts of life. By confronting her trauma head-on and emerging alive, she also ends the Bell women’s legacy of victimization.
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