by Toni Morrison · 1997
A group of armed men from the all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma raid a nearby former convent to kill or drive out the women sheltering there, and the novel moves between the men's rationalizations, voiced partly through Reverend Richard Misner's doubts about the town's hardening insularity, and the convent women's interwoven backstories, closing on an ocean vision of a woman named Piedade singing to a rescued companion.