![]() ![]() In 1950, Ruby makes her escape to New York, “where Colored girls and White pretended to be equal”, to look for her mother. She keeps her lips numb and her eyes empty. As a young child, with no adult protectors and only her friend Maggie to watch over her, Ruby is sent away and made to do horrifying things for pocket change. As soon as Ruby is born, Ruby’s mother leaves her caramel-skinned baby girl and flees the rapes and ropes of the south to reinvent herself as a white woman in New York City. Before Ruby is even born, her aunt is shot and killed by the sheriff’s deputies for relenting to a married white man’s demands. ![]() The locals never for a second stop to consider that Ruby Bell, the haunted, fatherless child of a light-skinned, red-haired woman, might have been shaped by the grinding weight of history.Īs Bond constructs that history over the 330 pages, we feel just how heavy it is. And yet the people of Liberty Township in east Texas attribute the “howling, half-naked” madness of the title character to her own sins and travels, both a comeuppance for her preternatural beauty and an active choice. Strange is when we don’t,” remarks a character in Cynthia Bond’s new novel, Ruby. ![]() “H ell, ain’t nothing strange when Colored go crazy. ![]()
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