Ruby

Ephram Jennings is Ruby’s friend and eventual romantic interest. He is a kind, quiet man who works as a grocery bagger for white people. Though seen as a “good Black man” by the women of Liberty (248), he is treated as a laughingstock by the men because he disregards traditional masculine norms. Ephram is a bisexual man who declines to objectify or take advantage of women. Like Ruby, Ephram is used to stifling his own desires. He lives with his sister, Celia, whom he calls “Mama” and has depended on as a mother figure since they were orphaned as teenagers.

Ephram has loved Ruby since their first encounter in childhood. While the rest of Liberty shuns her, Ephram courts Ruby with gentle, thoughtful advances. He is patient in the face of her resistance and her trauma triggers. Eventually, Ephram forms a loving relationship with Ruby that empowers her to share the long-held secrets of her past. Ephram and Ruby have both suffered from the loss of their parents and the ridicule of the town, so they understand one another on a deep level. When Celia turns the town against Ruby, Ephram must choose between his relationship to the rest of Liberty and his life with Ruby. He ultimately chooses Ruby, disillusioned with the hypocrisy displayed by his sister and the other residents.

Ephram’s character is a testament to the importance of patience, love, and support in helping someone heal from their trauma. The bond shared by Ruby and Ephram helps them both heal and find the strength to break generational curses.

Celia Jennings is Ephram’s older sister. Celia has raised Ephram as a son since they were functionally orphaned as teenagers. In the absence of any romantic relationships, Ephram is the most important man in Celia’s life. She relies on his devotion to her, so when he begins courting Ruby, she is petrified that the “harlot” will take her “son” away from her.

Celia displays internalized misogyny in the way she views other women. She blames rape victims like Neva and Ruby for their rapists’ actions, faulting them for being too pretty or too sexually available. This view is exacerbated by her blind use of the church as a gauge of morality. As a girl, she looked up to her father, Reverend Jennings, as an example of a good and godly man. When she witnessed him raping Ruby at the pit fire, her young mind blamed Ruby because she couldn’t accept her own father’s guilt. To deal with her trauma, Celia threw herself into the church and gave up on a romantic life completely. The resentment she harbors over this loss lingers into adulthood, manifesting in a deep-rooted grudge against Ruby.

Celia uses the rhetoric of the church to convince the town that Ruby is an agent of the Devil and that her relationship with Ephram must be severed. Her attempts to break the two up ultimately fail, as Ephram leaves the scene of his baptism and reunites with Ruby to begin a new life.

Reverend Omar Jennings is Celia and Ephram’s late father and the former reverend of In-His-Name Holiness Church. Reverend Jennings is remembered by the town as a respected member of the community who died a tragic death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. However, he is revealed as a violent sexual predator who introduced Ruby to centuries-old black-magic rape rituals and began pimping her out at the age of six.

As a child, Omar Jennings murdered his abusive father. His mother began raping him and fell pregnant with his child before he murdered her as well. In adulthood, he weaponized his masculinity to reclaim a sense of power in the world by orchestrating the ritualistic rape of young Black girls. His abuse continued until he was lynched by the KKK, who put a curse on him that condemned his soul to remain on earth.

After his death, Reverend Jennings’s cursed spirit is bound to Ruby’s body as the Dyboù. He continues to violate her and attempt to take her ghost children away, trapping her in a cycle of misery. The Dyboù uses the body of Chauncy to carry out further rituals meant to sabotage Ruby’s happiness, but when she finally fights back against him and reclaims her personhood, he flees and leaves her alone for good.

Reverend Jennings’s character represents many things: the cycle of abuse, the worst manifestations of misogynoir, and, in the form of the Dyboù, the trauma Ruby must overcome to come back to herself. He is a foil to Ruby because he took out his anger and trauma on innocent victims rather than trying to heal himself.

Ma Tante is an elderly woman who lives in a shack in Liberty’s woods. In contrast to the church, Ma Tante practices a form of folk magic that blends influences of voodoo and obeah. Though the townsfolk publicly decry Ma Tante’s spiritualism, many of them secretly visit her for help, so many that she grows wizened from years of absorbing the town’s sins.

Maggie takes Ruby to Ma Tante on the day Ephram first meets her. Ma Tante identifies Ruby’s ability to see into the spirit world, as well as the Dyboù on her heels. She also correctly guesses that Ruby is being sexually abused. Ma Tante performs a ritual to lift the curse laid on Ruby’s soul and then instructs her to cope with her assaults by dissociating from her physical body when they are happening. Though Ma Tante means well, she teaches Ruby to be complacent with her abusers, a lesson that Ruby carries with her into adulthood. Ma Tante’s inaction is a microcosm of the way Liberty at large fails to protect Ruby and other young Black girls from predators. Her unwillingness or inability to stand up to the reverend also emphasizes how hopeless it can feel to fight back against large-scale unfair power structures.