In 1957, Dennis is hospitalized with a bad cough. They also establish the New Brown Memorial Church near the Red Hook Projects in Brooklyn, where they live during most of the 1950s. Over the next decade and a half, Ruth and Dennis have seven children. In her grief, Ruth finds solace by becoming a devout Christian. When she calls Aunt Betts to find out which hospital, Betts tells her that Ruth is dead to the family because she married a Black man. That same year, Ruth learns that Mameh is dying in a hospital in the Bronx. By 1942, the two live together as husband and wife, causing Tateh to disown her. Ruth stops returning Rocky’s phone calls after meeting and falling in love with Andrew “Dennis” McBride, a deeply Christian Black man who works in one of her aunts’ factories. She spends most of her time in Harlem, hanging out with a man named Rocky who grooms her for sex work. The day after she graduates high school, Ruth takes a Greyhound bus to New York, where she lives with her grandma Bubeh.
Shortly after her return to Suffolk, Ruth learns that Peter is engaged to a young Black woman whom he also impregnated. Terrified of what will happen to Peter in a town like Suffolk, where lynchings and other acts of anti-Black terrorism are common, she spends the summer in New York City, where her Aunt Betts arranges for her to have an abortion.
When Ruth is in high school, she falls in love with a young Black man named Peter and becomes pregnant with his child. He also sexually abuses Ruth, routinely raping her from an early age. Tateh is emotionally abusive toward Mameh, who suffers lingering infirmities from a childhood battle with polio. After moving around the Northeast for a few years, the family settles in segregated Suffolk, Virginia, where Tateh opens a general store serving the town’s Black clientele, even though he is virulently racist. At age two, Ruth emigrates to the United States with Tateh, her mother Mameh, and her four-year-old brother Sam. This study guide refers to the 2006 ten-year anniversary edition published by Riverhead Books.īorn Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland in 1921, Ruth is the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi she calls Tateh.
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