Ruby Pearsall

Quick Facts

• Protagonist: One of two central narrators of The House of Eve
• Age and setting: Fifteen at the start; 1950s North Philadelphia
• Goal: Win a We Rise scholarship to Cheyney University and become an optometrist
• First appearance: Chapter 1
• Key relationships: Inez Pearsall (mother), Aunt Marie (aunt), Nene (grandmother), Shimmy Shapiro (first love); later intersects with Eleanor Quarles

Who They Are

Fiercely intelligent and painfully vulnerable, Ruby Pearsall is a girl sprinting toward a future the world keeps trying to slam shut. Her story navigates the steep climb of socioeconomic class and social mobility, the moral and material pressures of unwed pregnancy, motherhood, and shame, and the corrosive power of closely guarded secrets. Ruby’s brilliance and grit are never in doubt, but the novel insists on the cost: to succeed, she must choose which parts of herself to keep, which to bury, and which to lose forever.

Personality & Traits

Ruby’s personality fuses ambition with tenderness. Her mind is hungry; her heart stays soft, even when the world instructs her to harden. She dreams forward with a scholar’s focus and an artist’s sensitivity, which makes every setback feel both structural and deeply personal.

• Ambitious, with purpose: The We Rise program isn’t just a resume line—it’s her lifeline. Ruby stakes her identity on becoming an optometrist, a calling born from watching Nene’s glaucoma steal sight and stability from the grandmother who raised her.
• Resilient under pressure: She keeps advancing despite poverty, racism, and an abusive household, refusing to let others’ failures script her future.
• Artistically attuned: Painting becomes her oxygen—an interior space where she can metabolize shame, desire, and hope. Shimmy’s early recognition of her art validates a version of Ruby the world rarely sees.
• Vulnerable, shaped by shame: Her mother’s cruelty and men’s predatory gaze leave Ruby hyperaware of her body, fostering self-loathing she must continually unlearn.
• Loyal and loving: She anchors herself to the people who truly see her—Nene and Aunt Marie—and risks everything to love Shimmy, even when she knows the world won’t allow it.

Appearance

Ruby is a developing teen with walnut-colored skin like her mother, bangs that skim her eyelids to hide a forehead Inez once mocked, and curves that draw attention she doesn’t want. Her discomfort with her “oversized tits” and desire to be “flat like a pancake” mirror the novel’s scrutiny of the male gaze and the stigma attached to young Black girls’ bodies; her appearance becomes a site of shame, control, and, through art, eventual reclamation.

Character Journey

Ruby begins narrowly focused on beating the odds: show up to class, make the scholarship list, get out. Meeting Shimmy widens her world—someone finally sees the depth in her canvases and the steadiness of her brilliance. Their love is tender and careful but collides with the era’s racial and religious boundaries. Pregnancy turns hope into crisis. Pinned between poverty and promise, Ruby enters the House of Magdalene, gives birth in secrecy, and surrenders her daughter in exchange for the scholarship that might save her future. The choice is both empowering and annihilating; she becomes the architect of her own life while sealing away a part of herself. In the Epilogue, she appears as Dr. Pearsall—accomplished, composed, and shadowed by loss. A chance meeting with Eleanor Quarles and with Ruby’s biological daughter (now Wilhelmina) closes the circle: success arrived, but never unaccompanied.

Key Relationships

• Inez Pearsall: Ruby’s mother is neglectful and cutting, treating Ruby as competition rather than a child. When Inez sides with her boyfriend Leap after his predatory advance, the betrayal crystallizes Ruby’s understanding that home is not safe—and that escape must be total.
• Aunt Marie: Ruby’s refuge. Marie offers a room, food, and a protective silence that feels like love. Her home gives Ruby a place to paint and to think, and Marie’s steady pragmatism helps Ruby face the impossible choice of keeping her baby or keeping her future.
• Shimmy Shapiro: Ruby’s first love brings gentleness into a life starved of it. He recognizes her talent and personhood, yet their relationship exists under the doomed logic of the era: love is real, but the world is stronger. Their breakup and secret deal with his mother intertwine intimacy with sacrifice.
• Nene: Ruby’s grandmother provides the model of love that Ruby returns to in memory. Nene’s glaucoma sparks Ruby’s vocational calling—turning a family wound into purpose and linking care to career.

Defining Moments

Ruby’s turning points are private and seismic—each one narrowing her options while sharpening her will.

• The confrontation with Leap (in Chapter 1): Desperate for bus fare, Ruby accepts a kiss that becomes predation. When Inez blames Ruby and throws her out, the scene converts humiliation into resolve, making education not just a dream but a survival plan.
• Meeting Shimmy: He repairs a leak, notices her painting, and names the “small blue bird” searching for light within it. Being seen—truly—unlocks a version of Ruby that is more than scrappy or smart; it’s the self she wants to protect.
• The racist encounter downtown: A white woman’s slur shatters Ruby’s fragile hope that love alone can bridge segregated worlds. Public humiliation reframes their romance as untenable under America’s rules, not under Ruby’s heart.
• The decision at the House of Magdalene: After falling in love with her newborn, Ruby nevertheless honors the bargain that will fund college. The sacrifice binds her to a future she chose—and to a grief she can never fully name.

Symbols & Motifs

Ruby’s art is her truest language. Her canvases translate pain and longing into image: the “small blue bird” flickering in a dark field becomes Ruby herself, a light-seeking creature with too little sky. Her teacher’s insistence that art is “the friend that you can always return to” frames creativity as companionship, resilience, and a portable home—everything her real home is not.

Essential Quotes

It was times like this I wished there was a button that would erase me. Not to die or nothing. Just so I wouldn’t exist. At the very least, I’d like to take a pin to my oversized tits and pop them like water balloons. Making me at like a pancake, and as boring to watch as a teacup. Maybe then my mother would see me for who I was and stop calling me out my name. This passage captures Ruby’s body-shame and the learned self-erasure imposed by the gaze of men and the cruelty of her mother. It makes visible how misogynoir polices Black girls’ bodies and shows why invisibility, not visibility, sometimes feels like safety.

To paint was to breathe easy. When I picked up my brush, all my problems magically washed away. I had started painting about two years ago, after my We Rise teacher took us on a field trip to the Philadelphia College of the Arts for a class on oil painting... Louise stared at my painting for so long I had begun to sweat, worrying that I had done it all wrong. Then she touched my shoulder and said, “Art is the friend that you can always return to. It will always be there to heighten your feeling of aliveness. Keep going.” Art is positioned as more than hobby—it's a lifeline and a mirror. The teacher’s blessing legitimizes Ruby’s inner world, giving her a private resource she can carry into hostile spaces.

“You ready to be strapped down with a baby you can’t feed ’cause you ain’t earning shit cleaning up after white people, or go on to college and become a doctor?” She dished a card, then signaled that it was my turn. “Hell, choice seems easy to me. Stay poor like the rest of us, or climb, scratch and claw like hell to get out.” This blunt ultimatum translates structural inequality into a rigged game of choices. The quote clarifies why Ruby’s decision is not heartlessness but strategy in a world that punishes both motherhood and ambition in poor Black girls.

I stood with my back to the door, shaking uncontrollably. But I knew I had done the right thing. I had to move on. Even if it meant I would do so with only half my heart intact. I had lost the two people I loved most, Grace and Shimmy. I didn’t need to be happy, but I could not be poor. All I could do was believe that the future I was moving toward would be worth it. Here Ruby articulates the novel’s tragic arithmetic: prosperity at the price of wholeness. The line “I didn’t need to be happy, but I could not be poor” condenses the novel’s moral landscape into a single devastating conviction—survival is not the same as joy, and she chooses survival.