The Berry Pickers

Norma is one of the novel’s two protagonists. Although raised by white parents, Norma is really the kidnapped Ruthie, a First Nations girl stolen from her family by Lenore, the woman who claims to be her mother. Norma is plagued by recurring dreams as a child in which she encounters people whom she thinks are her family members, but who do not resemble her mother, father, or Aunt June. She always feels ill-at-ease in her family, sensing that something is not right.

As a young girl, Norma dreams of her real family. Her mother assures her that these dreams are not real, but as Norma’s true mother later points out, the dreams were her mind’s way of keeping her family alive, even after having been separated from them. As Norma gets older, she begins to notice key differences between her and her parents: Her skin is much darker than theirs. Their earlobes, an inherited trait, are markedly different. These inexplicable differences prompt Norma to learn everything that she can about genetics, and even though her mother tries to put a stop to her research, Norma does confess to her Aunt June as an adult that she had figured out that she was adopted.

Norma’s thirst for knowledge extends into other areas as well. She is a great lover of literature and reads voraciously. She wants to become a writer, but she never quite finds her voice and decides to become a teacher instead. When she is finally allowed to leave her parental home and attend college, she blossoms, and her years in school in Boston are the first time that she truly gets to experience freedom. After college she obtains a teaching position and begins what will become a lifelong career.

Norma struggles socially. In this way, her characterization parallels that of her brother Joe. Although each emerges from her disappearance with a different set of emotions and difficulties, there are ways in which each character struggles to recover from it. Joe is overcome by guilt. Norma, too, struggles with guilt, although her guilt has its origins in her mother’s nervous affliction. Lenore lives in constant worry that Norma’s real family will find her and take her back, and as a result, she is fiercely overprotective of her daughter. She experiences chronic headaches, a manifestation of her own suppressed guilt, and Norma perceives herself to be the cause of her mother’s pain. Their household is a strained one, and although Norma is not neglected, her childhood lacks warmth and laughter. She struggles to maintain friendships and her marriage fails when, after a miscarriage, she and her husband cannot agree on whether or not to have another child.

Although robbed of agency as a young person, she does take charge of her life as an adult when she finds out the truth about her origins. She holds June accountable for her role in the kidnapping’s coverup, and writes to her real family as soon as they are located. She travels to meet her mother and siblings and is absorbed seamlessly back into her family. Norma has at last found the place where she belongs. Norma’s character, in addition to her role within the novel’s story itself, is an allegorical representation of the more than 150,000 children ripped from their families and taken into the residential school system in Canada. These children, like Norma, were forcibly taken from their parents, separated from their cultural homelands, and taught only English, Christianity, and white-western values. The tremendous damage done not only to the children victimized by the residential schools but also to the various groups of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples is immeasurable, and to Canadian readers especially, Norma’s story is a metaphor for the broader dangers of assimilation and lost culture. As the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission tasked with investigating abuse came to light, public discourse in Canada has shifted away from understanding the schools as educational spaces. They are now largely seen as sites of trauma and abuse, and the children forced to attend classes there are now understood, like Ruthie, to have been “stolen” from their families and their home cultures.

Norma’s parents are the novel’s antagonists. They are not her true parents, and although it was Lenore who kidnapped the young Ruthie, her husband used his power as a judge to create false identity documents for the girl and is thus complicit in his wife’s crime. The character of Norma’s father is not as fully developed as Norma, Joe, June, or even his wife Lenore, but his aloofness contrasts starkly with the caring, involved parenting style of Ruthie’s/Norma’s real father. In this way, he serves as a foil, showcasing the kind of father which Ruthie misses out on because of her kidnapping. There is love between Norma and the man who raises her, and he does try to help her to deal with her difficult mother, but although he has sympathy for his daughter, he always in some way defends his wife, and the text does not ask readers to absolve him of the role that he played in Ruthie’s kidnapping.

Having lost a series of pregnancies, Lenore is distraught and consumed with grief and anxiety by the time she comes upon young Ruthie, quietly eating a sandwich by the side of a road. June cites her extreme emotional distress as the reason for Lenore having kidnapped Ruthie, but it is hard for readers to feel sympathy for a character capable of committing such a heinous crime. Further, because Ruthie/Norma herself never truly recovers from the kidnapping, still remembers her family, wishes for siblings, and is so deeply wounded when she finds out the truth, there is nothing in the narrative itself that excuses Lenore.

Lenore’s primary characteristic, other than her act of kidnapping, is the state of emotional distress in which she lives much of her life. By the time she steals Ruthie, Lenore is already emotionally worn down from the stress of so many failed pregnancies, and although June does not think that Lenore felt guilt about Ruthie per se, Lenore’s paranoia, her headaches, her quasi-agoraphobia, and her alcohol dependency suggest that she has not been able to fully banish her guilt.

Aunt June is initially characterized as an independent woman with a career. She smokes, lives alone in Boston, and suggests her friend Alice as a therapist to young Norma during the stage when she wakes each night crying from her strange dreams. She is more personable and more relatable than her sister Lenore, and, in many ways, she is the family member with whom Norma shares the greatest bond. Although the novel does not entirely clarify their relationship, she and Alice have romantic ambiguity and are implied to be in a relationship together. Lenore accuses them of romantic involvement during one of her outbursts, but the narrative buries the accusation in Lenore’s declining mental health.

Yet, June is not a very sympathetic character. Although she did not take part in the kidnapping itself, she made no move to alert the authorities about her sister’s crime and presents Norma with the quasi-justification that her allegiance had been to Lenore, and that she knew how distraught Lenore had been over having lost multiple pregnancies. In a text so full of small moments of anti-Indigenous racism, a character like June can be read as one of the more subtle, yet still insidious faces of white supremacy: She stands idly by while crimes are committed against a young girl of color. She is complicit in a crime so great that it robbed Ruthie/Norma of decades with her family and the chance to understand her familial and cultural history. It is obvious, both from Norma’s dreams and from her lifelong longing for siblings and a household with more laughter and love, that Norma did not truly belong in Lenore’s home. June bore witness to those many years of unhappiness and struggle, and still kept the truth secret. She also made an effort to put a stop to Norma’s quest for greater self-knowledge, and participated in the family-wide lies that Norma’s skin color was the result of an Italian ancestor.

Although June does not quite apologize, nor does she seem to fully grasp the enormity of what she helped to cover up, she does offer to help Norma/Ruthie find her true family, and it is through her research that they are able to locate them. In this way, June offers some atonement, but in the fracture that so many years of lying and obfuscation caused to her relationship with Norma, nothing could truly make up for June’s complicity.