Pilate and Ruth = Clarissa and Septimus

On the surface level, Ruth and Pilate are polar opposites of each other. Ruth grew up in the large house of her father, who was the only African American doctor in her neighborhood, while Pilate grew up in her dad's farmland and became an orphan when she was 12. Ruth is the mother of Macon's patriarchal family who often gets physically/mentally abused by her husband, and Pilate is the head of her matriarchal three-generational family. Underneath, however, these characters share some deep similarities. 

Fundamentally, these two characters grew up within a family without their mother and inevitably were heavily impacted by their fathers. An important way that they are impacted by their fathers is through their death, which leads both characters to become fearless in the face of death. For Pilate, she reveals that interacting with her father’s ghost allows her to feel indifferent/comfortable toward death: “death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead), she knew there was nothing to fear” (149). Similarly, after her father’s death, Ruth became “fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity” (64). 

In addition to their lack of fear of death, Ruth and Pilate somehow hold a common belief that death is controllable: Ruth thinks that her father chose to die even when he could have survived, and Pilate says that one chooses when and whether to die (and that some can even live forever if they wanted to). Further, the two women even have superpowers to directly interfere with death: Pilate helps Milkman magically survive (the Second) Macon’s repeated attempts to kill him, and Ruth somehow kept her father alive by “putting her hand on death’s chest and holding him back” (134). 

Perhaps due to their fearlessness and agency in the face of death, they feel very calmly protective when their children are in danger. When Reba is being beaten up by her boyfriend, Pilate is able to effectively take care of the situation by holding a knife above the boyfriend’s heart. As for Ruth, although she isn’t as charismatic and effective as Pilate, she resolutely heads to Pilate’s house after learning that Hagar is trying to kill Milkman. 

In this way, these two women, largely shaped by their connection to death, are protecting their "inner worlds" occupied by the people they value–analogous to Ruth’s garden of tulips (representing Milkman, dead Dr. Foster, and potentially Milkman's sisters) and the nicotianas in Pilate’s backyard (representing Reba and Hagar). 

Now the question is, so what? What do these profound similarities have to do with how we understand the relationship between Ruth and Pilate? 

Answer: These similarities allow the two characters to understand each other in an intimate way. 

We see Pilate and Ruth sensing their unique connection the moment they see each other: “Pilate came to see Macon right away and soon as she saw me she knew what my trouble was. And she asked me one day, ‘Do you want him?’” (125). At this moment, the two characters are complete strangers to each other, and yet Pilate immediately recognizes Ruth's suffering that no one else around her had noticed/cared about. This quote reminds me of the scene in Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa hears about Septimus from Sir Williams, (and without being given many details about Septimus) she spontaneously imagines the moment Septimus died and what would have led up to his death. The core idea behind Mrs. Dalloway was Clarissa’s Transcendental theory where people coming from very different backgrounds (and even those that haven’t met each other before) can somehow be connected and influence each other.  

Applying this principle to Ruth and Pilate, I wonder how this dynamic of implicit understanding (sprouting from their underlying similarity in their approach to death) would shape how these two characters interact with each other on the topic of Hagar’s attempts to kill Milkman. So far, we’ve seen that Pilate comes in between Ruth and Hagar and settles the situation by inviting Ruth into her house and telling her about her life. We’ll just have to keep on reading to see how Ruth responds to Pilate’s story and their present situation with Hagar and Milkman (honestly, we've come too far in the reading without more details about what happened in that scene that I doubt we'll learn any more about it in the future). 

Note ** I didn’t mention this above because I wasn’t sure how this would fit in with the rest of the post, but along the lines of their superpower, both characters also maintain ongoing communication with their fathers even after their death. As implied above, Pilate occasionally sees her father's ghost or hears the voice of her father who often helps her out in tough situations (ex. Tells her to sing when she’s suffering from postpartum depression). Ruth visits her father’s grave six times a year because “talking” to her father gives her relief from feeling miserable that no one cares about her. Therefore, interaction with the dead (not referring to the last name) could be seen as a way that these two characters cope with the struggles in their life and become empowered to keep on living.