The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true. Blackflies don’t discriminate. But now, lying here almost fifty years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can’t even see, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not anymore. Maybe we are sour.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed with The Berry Pickers: Somehow both highly melodramatic — with multiple misfortunes befalling one undeserving Mi'kmaq family — and completely unsurprising in its predictable plotting. But I’ll also add that I found this to be overdramatic and predictable in the vein of Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult — both highly successful authors with big fan bases — so I don’t mind concluding (and especially in light of this novel’s high rating on Goodreads) that this just wasn’t a fit for me personally and I wish much success to debut author Amanda Peters. Slight spoilers beyond here (but as everything is given away in the first chapter, I wouldn’t consider them plot-ruining).
In the years since Ruthie went missing, Mom had come to a soft understanding of the situation. She would try her damnedest to not be sad. She couldn’t promise complete happiness or fully rid herself of the anger, no matter how many times a week she put on those shoes and walked to the big stone church in town, but she would harness the sadness. She would harness it and tame it and keep it still and quiet. And she did this by believing that Ruthie was out there somewhere, growing up, eating ice cream, reading books and remembering her mother. We let her. But we still looked.
In 1962, while her family was working an annual blueberry harvest in Maine, four-year-old Ruthie disappeared; and although her family would eventually be forced to go home to Nova Scotia without her, the tragedy would go on to affect her parents and siblings for the rest of their lives. As The Berry Pickers opens, the story of her disappearance is told from Ruthie’s brother Joe’s perspective as he lies dying of cancer in the family home in the modern day. Perspective in the next chapter shifts to that of a young girl named Norma narrating her unhappy life with cold and overbearing parents in the 60s, and it’s immediately clear that this is Ruthie growing up in the family that snatched her. POV rotates between Joe in the present — mostly telling the story of his hard life to his estranged daughter — and watching Ruthie/Norma grow into adulthood, always feeling a sense of disconnection from her ersatz parents. (And as the prologue ends with Joe and Ruthie’s sister Mae saying, “There’s someone here to see us. And I think we might have some catching up to do.”, there’s no intended surprise that Ruthie/Norma will eventually learn about her birth family and go to see them. There’s truly no narrative tension in the plot.)
As a Mi'kmaq, Joe experiences episodes of racism throughout his life, but I don’t know if Peters did the character any favours by portraying Joe — despite coming from a stable, loving family — as an angry and violent heavy drinker (which another character defends as understandable for someone with a history of intergenerational trauma which we just don’t see: Joe’s parents are hard-working, church-going, family-first and thoroughly present and supportive; the loss of Ruthie and other family drama notwithstanding). And when two major episodes of systemic racism are faced by the family — the local sheriff in Maine won’t help search for Ruthie, and when they return home, the local Indian Agent wants to take away the remaining children for their supposed protection — the family’s dad is aggressive and defiant without consequence (which on the one hand feels like grandiose wish-fulfilment, and on the other, makes it sound like if only more fathers would have levelled shotguns at the authorities, fewer children would have been stolen and sent off to the Residential Schools.) Despite some very dramatic events in the life of this family, this novel didn’t give me any feel for what it was like to have lived through those events as First Nations people. (And there were some logical inconsistencies, as with Joe concluding on his deathbed, in the quote I opened with, that maybe his people are “sour”, despite twice agreeing with a stranger over the years that that’s not true; it seems like Peters liked the sound of that sentence, without really believing it, so put it there.)
I’ve always wondered at the secrets the dead take with them. Some are unintended secrets, things they never got around to saying, like “I’m sorry” or “The money is hidden in the shoebox at the back of the closet.” Some secrets are so dark that it’s best they remain buried. Even people who exude light and happiness have dark secrets. Sometimes, the lie becomes so entrenched it becomes the truth, hidden away in the deep recesses of the mind until death erases it, leaving the world a little different. Secrets and lies can take on a life of their own, they can be twisted and manipulated, or they can burst into the world from the mouth of someone just as they are starting to lose their mind.
Overall: This was interesting enough, and plenty happens — and I was not entirely unaffected emotionally — but The Berry Pickers was a middle-of-the-road read for me (but highly rated, so take my opinion for what's it's worth).
