57 pages • 1 hour read
Cynthia BondRuby
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1: “Wishbone”
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: Ruby contains graphic descriptions of violence and child abuse, including physical and sexual abuse and assault, incest, infant death, and homicide; potentially upsetting depictions of racism; and intolerance toward gay people. These topics are pervasive in the text.
In 1963, a poised and beautiful Ruby Bell returns from New York City to her birthplace, all-Black Liberty Township in Texas. Over the next 11 years, her mental health declines, earning her a reputation as “howling, half-naked mad” (10). She is often seen wandering the town in a catatonic state, sustaining herself on charity from Miss P, owner of the corner store, P&K. Locals sometimes hear her wailing out in the woods at night and see her digging in the earth with her hands. Most people avoid Ruby, but Ephram Jennings watches her with interest. Ephram is a kindly Black man whose calm nature causes him to go unnoticed by most people, Black and white.
By 1974, Ephram is living with his sister, Celia, who has taken on a motherly role since the loss of their parents. Their father, Reverend Omar Jennings, once presided over the local In-His-Name Holiness Church, until the day in 1937 that his wife, Otha, showed up to a church picnic naked. Otha was promptly committed to a psychiatric hospital, Dearing, then transferred to another psychiatric hospital, Kindred, where she lived out her remaining years before dying in a fire when the segregated ward of the hospital burned down. Shortly afterward, Reverend Jennings was expelled from his position at the church and went on the road to preach. When Ephram was 13, Revered Jennings was found lynched near Marion Lake. As an adult, Ephram lives an isolated life and experiences chronic pain.
Ephram decides to take Ruby one of Celia’s special white lay angel cakes, making up a lie to disguise his intentions, as he knows Celia wouldn’t make the cake if she knew it was for Ruby. Celia says that everyone in town is surprised Ruby came back to Liberty. She was a pretty girl who was raised by a well-off white woman after her father died. She was supposed to make something of herself in New York. There are rumors around town that she has turned to sex work to support herself.
As Celia talks, Ephram is overwhelmed by pain. He stumbles to his bedroom to lie down.
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
The narrative shifts back in time to Ephram’s childhood. The woods of Liberty are alive with sound—“the call of crows […] the purring of doves […] The screams of a Black man” (22). Ephram eats a slice of Celia’s white lay angel cake on his way to Marion Lake, where he fishes for catfish. He ponders recent goings-on in his family: Reverend Jennings has just been ousted from his position in the Liberty church and has taken his services on the road. When he comes home, all he wants to do is drink or sleep.
Ephram spots two girls sitting nearby. He recognizes Margaret “Maggie” Wilkins, who is known to be particularly adept at fighting. Maggie comes over to use Ephram’s pole, introducing her friend as Ruby. Maggie and Ruby are expected at the home of a woman named Ma Tante. Reverend Jennings has forbidden Ephram to go near Ma Tante, but he tags along anyway.
Ma Tante’s shack sits in the middle of a clearing in the pine woods. The inside is cluttered with knives and other paraphernalia that frighten Ephram. Ma Tante is a wizened woman from Jamaica who practices Caribbean folk magic. No one in town will admit to following Ma Tante, but it’s common knowledge that locals come to her for help with their families and love lives.
Ma Tante brews a strange-smelling tea for Ruby. She says that Ruby was born with an ability to “see into the gray world” and asks how many “haints” have been following her (36). Ruby replies that there are three. Ma Tante says that Ruby has a powerful hex on her spirit and needs a ritual done; she sends Ephram and Maggie outside, where they argue about Ruby’s safety. Maggie insists she wouldn’t let Ruby get hurt. Ephram realizes that Maggie is in love with Ruby and recalls an anti-gay comment made by his father. When Ephram refuses to go home, Maggie beats him unconscious.
Inside, Ma Tante finishes her ritual. She pulls Ruby onto her lap and tells her to watch out for Dyboù, which can extinguish her soul, while haints are only a nuisance. She asks if Ruby has already been taken to “the pit fire” and advises her to “fly off next time they take you” (42), leaving her body so that she can come back to it afterward. She also warns Ruby not to tell Maggie anything.
Ephram comes to and rejoins Ruby in the shack, where she tells him that her mother lives in New York City and is planning to pick her up next month. Until then, she’ll continue living in nearby Neches with a white woman named Miss Barbara.
Another customer arrives, and Ma Tante ushers the children out. She gives each of them a small gris-gris, a talisman meant to protect against evil. Ruby’s gris-gris is a doll with a lodestone on its back. Ma Tante knows the dolls are useless because they are newly-made and haven’t absorbed the power of time, but she wants to make an effort to protect them anyway.
In the narrative present, Ephram wakes up in bed. Hours have passed since he fell asleep. He hurries out of the house with Celia’s white lay angel cake.
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Ephram takes the main road of Liberty toward Bell land, carrying the cake and two of Ma Tante’s dolls, his own and Ruby’s, in a handkerchief. His pants tear during a fall off his porch, but his cargo is unharmed. As he walks, Ephram sees several of the Rankin brothers out working the land. All of the Rankin brothers are tall and handsome. Ephram secretly envies Chauncy Rankin, the handsomest of the bunch.
On a blackboard in front of In-His-Name Holiness Church, Pastor Joshua is writing a line of scripture, a Saturday tradition. Ephram stops to greet the pastor. They discuss the funeral of the Rankin family patriarch, Junie, which is scheduled for the following Monday. Ephram has taken the day off to help. Joshua thanks him for always being a friend of the church and sends him on his way.
Book 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Mere paces from the church is Bloom’s Juke, a bootleg liquor joint. Liberty is a dry county, but Ed Bloom’s house is a gathering point for the town’s men on Saturday nights. Bloom has partitioned off the back of the house for use as a brothel when sex workers from Beaumont make their monthly visits.
Ephram recalls the previous Saturday at Bloom’s. As he sipped liquor outside of the bar, he was joined by several men from town, including Ole Pete, one of the Rankin brothers, and the Samuels brothers, one of whom, K. O., is Celia’s former beau. The men bemoaned the lack of attractive women in Liberty and fondly recalled the beautiful Bell girls who used to live in town—Girdie, Charlotte, and Neva. All three Bell girls had gotten in trouble, but Neva Bell had it the worst.
Ole Pete recounts their history: In 1932, patriarch Mr. Bell lived in Liberty with his three daughters. The oldest, Neva, was a beautiful girl with fair skin, strawberry-blond hair, and blue eyes. Neva worked for a powerful white family called the Leeches in nearby Newton. One night after she put the Leech children to bed, their father tried to rape her. She quit the next day, but Mr. Leech chased her persistently up and down the road from Liberty. He wore her down until he succeeded in catching and raping her in a ditch by Marion Lake. After that, no one in town could look Neva in the eyes.
Mr. Leech had a house built out in the woods for Neva, only letting her leave once a week to go to church and dinner with her family. When he announced that he was leaving his wife for Neva, word of Mrs. Leech’s humiliation spread quickly around town. The following weekend, as Neva walked to P&K with her sisters, they were set upon by Sheriff Levy. Charlotte and Girdie were taken to jail in Newton, but Levy’s men brought Neva to a hill overlooking Marion Lake. Donning Ku Klux Klan hoods, they raped and tortured her for hours. When they were done, they shot her 27 times and hung her body from a tree. Years later, news trickled down from the local mortuary that Neva’s heart had been removed. People speculated that the Ku Klux Klan had used it in one of their black-magic rituals secretly practiced out in the woods.
Charlotte Bell was raped during the night she spent in jail. She fell pregnant and gave birth to Ruby the following June but abandoned her to move to New York when Ruby was less than a year old. Ruby lived with her grandfather until he got too ill to care for her, whereupon she moved in with Miss Barbara’s family in Neches.
After hearing Ruby’s story, K. O. mused that it wasn’t surprising when Black people went “crazy,” reflecting, “Strange is when we don’t” (62). Gubber joked that Ruby would sleep with any man who looked her way and speculated whether she had an evil spirit inside of her.
In the present, Ephram continues down the main road. He decides to stop in at Bloom’s Juke, but as he crosses into the yard, he’s stopped by Sheriff Levy Junior. Junior asks if Ephram is spying, stealing, or buying bootleg liquor, before being distracted by the sound of a crow lighting in a nearby tree.
Ephram checks his watch. It’s 4:10—he still has time to stop at P&K to fix the rip in his pant leg and reach Ruby’s home before nightfall. As he starts walking again, the crow flies overhead toward the Bell house.
Book 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The crow glides on over town, following the road through the town square and out past Marion Lake, out to Bell land. There, she lands outside Ruby’s bedroom window. Ruby is asleep, a rare occurrence. Her life in New York was glamorous and exciting, but since returning to Liberty she has lost her sense of self and her sense of time, often wandering in a fugue state and coming to miles from where she started. Some nights she wakes up on the forest floor naked and bruised from sexual encounters she can’t remember.
Since coming home, Ruby has been plagued by a Dyboù that appears in her room as a dark mass of shadow and violently assaults her. She is simultaneously aroused and terrified by its presence. The Dyboù has taught her to “rape her own body each night” (71) by hitting herself and calling herself cruel names.
The day after the Dyboù first appeared, Ruby followed the sound of a crying child to Marion Lake, where she found a ghost girl sobbing in the water. Ruby knew that the girl had been murdered by drowning in the lake. The child climbed into her stomach for protection, but when the Dyboù returned that night he sucked the little girl into his body.
Ruby ran screaming into the woods, where she met a parade of frightened tarrens, “the spirits of murdered children” (72). Ruby let them enter her body for protection. She knows the Dyboù will soon return to steal them away.
Book 1, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Ruby takes place in the Deep South from the 1960s to the 1970s, against the backdrop of a changing racial landscape. Bond references real historical events like the Great Migration to capture a region on the cusp of massive social change. Despite strides made by the Civil Rights Movement, Liberty’s history as a former town of enslaved people is woven indelibly into its present. Bond imbues the landscape with a sense of memory; even Liberty’s trees mourn the men and women who were hanged from their branches.
Liberty’s Black residents largely work for and are governed by white people. The days of open KKK rule are only a generation behind, and the current sheriff is the son of the murderous Klansman who shamelessly raped, shot, and hanged a daughter of Liberty. The town’s residents have little power to alter their circumstances and instead seek comfort in outlets like drinking, sex, or prayer.
Rich spiritual imagery pervades the narrative. In-His-Name Holiness Church lies at the center of Liberty’s small-town social sphere. Descriptions of men and women in their starched Sunday best, baking cakes for sick neighbors, paint a picture of a supportive community united in faith. In contrast, Bond uses vivid imagery of folk magic when describing Ma Tante, the old woman who is relegated to the dark of the woods as punishment for her unorthodox practices. Ma Tante’s rituals draw on the Caribbean folk practices of voodoo and obeah. While her home is strewn with symbols traditionally tied to “dark” magic, like hunting knives and mysterious herbal brews, she shows empathy and patience to a young Ruby.
Bond sets up the church as the center of Liberty’s social sphere and highlights how people who deviate from its traditions incur moral scrutiny, invoking the idea of Religion as a Moral Determinant. For the town at large, morality is drawn along religious lines. There is an element of performance to this, as the townsfolk who publicly decry Ma Tante secretly flock to her for help with their personal lives.
Copious threads of Misogynoir and the Jezebel Stereotype are woven into the town’s religious fabric. Women are broadly sorted into two categories: In one bucket are virtuous women like Celia, placid and nurturing mother figures who are devoid of sexuality; in the other are women like Ruby and Baby Girl Samuels, who are shamed as sinners for expressing their sexuality. The men of Liberty are not subjected to the same scrutiny, free to openly patronize the local brothel and objectify young women’s bodies.
Ruby is introduced as the town pariah, shamed and outcast for a “madness” that is blamed on “the wages of sin and travel” (10). Even though the townsfolk have known Ruby since childhood, they don’t intervene to help her beyond providing her enough essentials to survive on. She receives no social support and instead becomes the subject of derogatory gossip.
Through snippets of dialogue and Ruby’s memory, Bond hints at a dark legacy of sexual violence against Black women in Liberty to explore Trauma and the Role of Love in Salvation. Ruby is the product of the rape of 17-year-old Charlotte Bell, who fled Liberty due to traumatic experiences. The gang rape and murder of Neva Bell illustrate how a long history of racism and sexism enables white men to treat Black women’s bodies and lives as disposable. Yet this type of violence isn’t perpetuated solely by white men. The same Black men who decry Neva’s rape speak with a cruel lust about Ruby’s “used toothpick [of] a body” (63) and shame her for her supposed promiscuity.
Bond implies that Ruby is being raped by residents of the town who take advantage of her altered state of mind. In the narrative present, she is symbolically raped by the Dyboù, who appears as a black mass. The interlude at Ma Tante’s suggests that people in town were aware that she was being abused as a child but chose to turn a blind eye—in fact, Ma Tante even tells Ruby not to report her abuse to Maggie. Rather than receiving help from her community, Ruby is shamed as a fallen soul. The symptoms of her suffering are taken as a manifestation of her supposed sins.
The town’s attitude toward Ruby’s “madness” exacerbates her isolation. While the townsfolk dismiss her as “buck-crazy” (10), the sections of the novel told from her perspective illuminate the fact that she is simply more attuned to “the gray world” than others (36). She feels the generations of trauma whose echoes pervade Liberty. The Dyboù symbolizes Ruby’s own trauma, which has haunted her since childhood. Bond uses magical realism to personify trauma and the hidden darkness under Liberty’s holy exterior into a tangible creature bent on destroying Ruby’s life.
