Paradise (1997), Morrison's seventh novel and the third instalment of her historical trilogy, is a story of two, isolated and self-sustained, communities in conflict. The first one is Ruby, an all-black town founded in the 1940s by a group of blue-black migrants, which prides itself on a long-standing tradition and history reaching back to the 1890s. At that time, the Ruby forefathers had travelled from Louisiana and Mississippi to Oklahoma where they had set the town of Haven, relocated later to the site of the present Ruby. The other, 17 miles away from Ruby, is a convent (formerly an embezzler's mansion and then a Catholic mission for Native Indian girls – currently known to the local people as the Convent), housing a group of five emancipated women who, having fled from their trauma-inflicted past lives, find shelter from the outside world within the Convent's walls.

Ruby's connectedness to the past and its faithfulness to the old values and verities bestowed upon the community by the founding fathers is safeguarded by the twin brothers, Steward and Deacon (Deek) Morgan – the town's leaders and its most powerful denizens. The Morgans are also Ruby's memory bearers and most prominent representatives of the descendants of the nine original families (the so-called “8-rocks”), the erstwhile settlers of Haven/Ruby. The history of the town centres around a founding myth built on the memory of the “Disallowance,” which symbolizes a momentous point in the collectivity’s past, when the ancestral families were barred by the lighter- skinned blacks of Fairy, Oklahoma, from joining their settlement in the 1890s, during the Ruby's ancestors’ westward march away from the Southern apartheid. While the ancestral story is piously remembered and commemorated by the townspeople, their conservative ways of living, following the code of blood color to sustain the community’s racial purity, remain unaltered for decades. Ultimately, the unwavering belief in its homogenous communal identity, shaped by common history, secures Ruby's endurance, continuity and prosperity.

Contrary to the Ruby inhabitants, the Convent women (Consolata, Mavis, Grace, Seneca, and Divine), who live on the town's far periphery in a close-knit group, struggle to forget their troubled pasts.