When the part of life on which we’ve trained our focus threatens to overwhelm us, sometimes it helps to change the scale. We can zoom in to the personal or microscopic, or zoom out to the cosmos or a geologic time scale.
Having been focused on US politics recently, my need to change scale and focus is to be expected. Ironic, perhaps, that I took refuge in an exquisite Japanese film about death (Departures: very highest recommendation) and first time novelist Amanda Peters’ award-winning story, The Berry Pickers, of the theft of Indian children from their families.
The Berry Pickers shows how bigotry is found in the actions, not just of governments, but of individuals with no nefarious conscious motives. The story is told of and by two people from the same community of Indians in Nova Scotia who are seasonal workers in the berry patches of Maine. One family has been picking Maine berries for years. In 1962 their youngest girl, Ruthie, was spending time with her brother, Joe. They were close to home when Joe left Ruthie sitting on a rock, getting to know the world. And then she was gone.They searched high and low for her until, eventually, they had to return home. They returned every year for a while, and always kept an eye out for her, but never found her. After a shocking and capricious act of violence took another sibling, they did not return.
Meanwhile, in Maine, a girl named Norma from the same community lived with an American husband and wife as their daughter. They kept her heritage from her, and hid her away in the house with little latitude for where she spent time away from home, and with whom. Even so, they loved her, in one of the ways in which dysfunctional families love one another. You know how that is, probably.
Through these narrative bifocals we see the allure, power, and fear of belonging.
Peters’ ability to honor the complexity of individual and family psychologies serves her story well. Her portrayal of her characters and their flaws reminds me of Tony Hillerman’s novels. (Also recommended if you’ve not read them. He was a white man raised among Navajo people. His novels were so faithful to their traditions, and respectful of The People, that they have been used in Navajo schools.) Peters, like Hillerman, treats even those with the most consequential flaws sympathetically. Both authors seem to seek understanding, not just judgment. We are who we are for reasons.
“There are some people, Joe, that we make allowances for. You know he nearly drowned as a baby and didn’t quite grow up right after that. Nothing wrong with Frankie. God must have had a plan for him, so we take him just the way he is. He needs this [work] each summer just like we do. He likes to come and sit ‘round the fire and earn a bit of pocket change…. Just get back to work and be kind to Frankie. You never know when you might need kindness from people.”
As someone once said, “you can’t possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.” Which complicates things, doesn’t it? Because if love comes before judging, we may never find our way to getting the judging done.
You’ll find that The Berry Pickers earned its awards. Spending time with good, albeit flawed, people might even restore some shattered faith in humankind.