Ruby Bell IS possessed by haints, and harassed by a powerful 'Dybou,' a negative force out of Ma Tante's conjure world. He has been raised under the overweening watch of his sister Celia, to the point where he refers to her as 'Mama.' It has not been much of a life for Ephram, whose sole singular experience was the trip to Ma Tante's shack where he spent time under Ruby's alluring sway.Ĭelia wears the black hat here, a looming presence enforcing a narrow and mean-spirited strain of Christianity, which makes the fact that she is actually right, easy to overlook. A positive outcome depends upon the success of 42-year old Ephram, a man who, as a child, saw his mother committed to the crazy house and his father lynched.

May already be too late.'Īnd the rest of the story unfolds so as to answer whether it is too late, or not.

Make her flypaper for all manner of traveling haint. 'This child gots a powerful hex 'sur son esprit,' done by peoples who knows how. They feastin' on yo' soul.' the seer says. 'Child, they ride you like a chariot ride a horse. Ma Tante is spiritually attuned enough to know that 'haints' or lost souls tend to follow Ruby around. It's a great scene, powerfully visualized, successfully conveying the type of experience that sears a child's memory.

She is blessed, or cursed, with a beauty worthy of attention and that attention marks her for an interaction with influential Christian locals who are given to the secret practice of something called 'conjure.'Įarly in the story, Ephram Jennings joins the child Ruby, and her knockabout soul sister Maggie, for an adventure that lands them in the home of one Ma Tante, a kind of voodoo seer. Ruby is a product of the rape of a black woman by a white man. It's about other things, too, many other things that are more easily enjoyed in the reading than sorted out for review: Love unrequited, child abuse, the black/white schism in the American south, lesbianism, voodoo, lynching and the bondage to which human beings subject one another. 'Ruby' is a story about 'the needle of lust that pierces the heart of small church towns,' in this case, Liberty, Texas, which is located somewhere between Beaumont and Houston.

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