In Paradise, Morrison returns us as readers to tracking and tracing. “Ruby” begins a cascade that attends to the violence of those concepts, but I urge you at the same time also to be alert to how the novel insists once again on the both/and.
As part of that, here’s a link to a searchable (yes) index of the “Lost Friends” column that ran in the New Orleans Southwestern Christian Advocate. The column, according to the site’s homepage, ran for decades after 1877, and was composed of “messages from individuals seeking loved ones lost in slavery.”