The Berry Pickers a Moving Novel

 

 

 

The Berry Pickers (2023)

By Amanda Peters

Catapult Books, 303 pages.

★★★★

 

The Berry Pickers is a tale of loss and of people trying to find their way home. The latter journey entails getting back to Nova Scotia by way of Maine, Boston, and Saskatchewan.

 

This superb debut novel by Amanda Peters begins in 1962; that is before the Sixties became the Sixties. But she doesn't stop there; hers is a saga that spans 50 years before it resolves. The title is meant to be taken literally. The home away from home is the Ellis farm near Bangor, Maine. It serves as a vivid and poignant fulcrum for a story that involves the migrant workers who pluck blueberries from the bushes. The owners live in a columned white house, while their seasonal laborers, though well-treated, reside in a much humbler facility. The migrants that concern us come from the family of Lewis and Kiju, Mi’kmaw Indians from Nova Scotia, and their children: Charlie, Ben, Joe, and Ruthie.

 

Four-year-old Ruthie is a spirited and carefree child. Her family are faithful workers, but being Indian is not a good thing in rural Maine during the early 1960s. As children, Ruthie and six-year-old brother Joe have more free time. Joe is supposed to keep his eye on Ruthie, but as they are playing near Ruthie’s favorite big rock, Joe’s attention briefly waivers, and Ruthie disappears. Owners and workers alike join Ruthie's family in trying to find her, though local law enforcement isn't all that concerned. Where is she? Lost in the woods? Dragged off by animals? Injured? A victim of foul play? Each year the family returns to the Ellis farm to work and seek new clues of Ruthie's fate. Such is the depth of their loss that they carry with them Ruthie's tiny boots and her favorite doll. Joe blames himself for what happened.

 

Their sorrow parallels that of Frank and Lenore, who are desperate to have a child. Lenore impulsively abducts a toddler and her ineffectual husband covers for her. The girl is named Norma and has a comfortable life, though she’s nearly smothered by her mother’s helicopter parenting. Norma is very bright, but each time she seeks to spread her wings, Lenore comes down with a crippling migraine. Norma suffers from troubling dreams and wonders why she's darker than immediate relatives.

 

You don't need higher math to add 1 + 1 on the setup, but Peters’ gift is to show the depth of damage done through pain, prejudice, and misplaced good intentions. Norma’s only ally is her aunt June, who connects her to Alice, a counselor who helps her deal with her anguish. June and Alice have secrets of their own, but Alice’s mentoring helps Norma gain a degree of independence–but only a degree. She attends college in Boston where she lives with her aunt June, though she's also protective of Norma. When her 19-year-old niece wanders into an Indian rally in Boston–this is the time of the American Indian Movement and “red power”–June forcibly pulls her away when a young man seeks to talk with her.

 

The novel is told mostly through the point of view of either Joe or Norma. As the calendar flips forward, Joe carries the additional burden of Charlie's death. Joe's guilt turns to anger, simmers, and boils. His downward spiral sends him on a wayward journey. In essence he becomes an adult runaway, occasionally helped and often scorned. As for Norma, she becomes an English teacher and a wife, though her marriage unravels.  

 

Peters will eventually return us to Nova Scotia. Her resolution is a take on the Biblical adage “you will know the truth and it will set you free,” but its more complicated than a gift-wrapped ending. I admired the deftness with which Peters structured a novel in which we largely know what happened but must wait to find out what it meant. Without resorting to heavy-handed preaching or delving deeply into countercultural sloganeering, Peters ripped the veneer off of postwar biases. Peters is of also of Mi’kmaw heritage, and The Berry Pickers quietly diverts our ethnic gaze from the macro level to how it plays out in two families who must learn from each other. Like Maine blueberries, such interactions are fragile and are best handled softly.

 

Rob Weir

The Lioness of Boston

 

 

 

The Lioness of Boston  (2023)

By Emily Franklin 

Godline, 369 pages

★★★

 

 

When you enter the Gardner Museum in Boston you step inside the realm of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). In The Lioness of Boston novelist Emily Franklin seeks to take us inside “Belle’s” mind. Lioness gathers steam with Belle’s marriage to to John “Jack” Lowell Gardner in 1860, then follows three prongs:  Belle’s problems with Boston Society, her nonconformist domestic life, and the philanthropic work for which she is best known.

 

The narrative structure follows a straight biographical line, the sort you could read in an encyclopedia. In such a structure, writers generally add speculative color to add drama. Franklin confines herself to invented dialogue, but this makes the book situationally claustrophobic. For example, one might expect a person married in 1860 to have something to say about the Civil War–even if she was just 20 at the time. Instead, Franklin’s centerpiece is the rigidity of Boston Society after the Civil War. 

 

It might surprise those who think of Boston as a bastion of liberalism to discover that it was once one of the most uptight cities in America. This is particularly true for member of the upper classes who feared anything vaguely unorthodox. If you have read the book or seen the movie The Age of Innocence you know that upper-class Brahmin society was rooted in Protestantism, conservatism, and nativism. They Brahmins were obsessed with propriety to the point of scripting how people men and women were to behave. Business and the public realm was for men; women, the “weaker” sex, were relegated to socializing with other women and taking care of children and households. 

 

This was burdensome to Belle Gardner, born into a rich, cosmopolitan New York family and whose adolescent education took place abroad. Imagine being deemed odd because you asked an architect to put different colored bricks and an arch in the pathway to your house. For quite some time, Belle’s only confidants were Jack and his sister Julia, whom she met when they were students in Paris. Alas, both Belle’s infant son and Julia died in 1865. Scandalmongers chalked up Belle’s subsequent miscarriage and breakdown to her bohemian ways. Never mind that Belle later became a good caregiver to three nephews.

 

At the Gardner Museum you will find a Venetian villa in the courtyard. That's because Belle felt much more comfortable in Italy than she did in Boston. In Franklin’s telling, Belle had to flee Boston to find her authentic self.  She and Jack spent many years traveling and living in Europe. As if she hadn't scandalized Boston society enough, imagine what “proper” Bostonians made of eccentric friends such as Bernard Berenson, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler. Belle collected offbeat artists, unorthodox architects, and book antiquarians the way one might collect Pokémon cards. It would be fair to say that she found more kinship among them.   

 

Technically, Belle lived on Beacon Hill, but her intellect resided with the rare books, classical European art , and objects from the Near East that she collected. These, of course, became the foundation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Today, many of the paintings and objects are in exactly the position in which she placed them. 

 

Here's a rub of readers. How much do you care about the travails of the upper class? For all Belle’s struggles, she was born into money, married into money, and died with more money. Franklin does a superb job of shining light on the snobbery of Boston society, but this too is something easily discovered. It’s an unfair comparison; but this was novelist Edith Wharton’s forte.  

 

Isabella Stewart Gardener is indeed fascinating, but sometimes The Lioness of Boston seems a souped-up encyclopedia entry. More engagement with the outside world would have helped, as would greater development to Jack’s character to imbue him with more depth than a yes-man appendage to Belle’s discontent. Do not misunderstand me, if you don't know much about Gardner, you should read The Lioness of Boston. My chief complaint is that too often the lioness is more like a declawed domestic cat then a ferocious beast. I wish that Franklin, like her protagonist, had been less orthodox. 

 

Rob Weir  

 

Relive the Age of Rail at the Shelburne Museum

 

 

All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840-1955

Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education

Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont

Through October 20, 2024

 

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to jump on a train and go anywhere in the United States you wanted? Take a look at this map from the late 1890s and you’ll see a spidery steel web that could have made your dream come true. 

 

Then

 

 

Now look at the map of what we have today. What happened? In a word, the automobile. Once Americans fell in love with the private automobile, railroads started to get ripped up. The building of interstate highways from 1956 on was the final blow that reduced the once-robust rail network of yore to today’s 80-pound weakling Amtrak system. 

 

 

Now

 

An exhibit at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum takes us back to the days in which rail was king. Lest you think automobile travel is superior, consider that in 1880 it took about 3 ½ days to get from New York to the West Coast by train. It still does, Amtrak jokes aside. If you drive and you actually stop to eat, see things, and sleep, it takes 5-6 days.

 

The railroad did as much if not more to knit the nation together as the Civil War. Think of living in the hinterlands in say, North Williston, Vermont, the Catskills of New York, some lonely outpost in the middle of nowhere, or the vast Texas plains and seeing a puff of steam in the distance. Even if you weren’t waiting to board, it reminded you there was a larger world to explore beyond your little slice of it. Actually, you don’t need to imagine it; the artists included in All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art have done it for you. 

Charles Heyde Steam in North Williston VT 1850

Thomas Cole River in the Catskills 1843

Charles Bowling Church at the Crossroads 1936

Georgia O'Keeffe Train Coming in Canyon, TX 1916

 

Artists have also captured the urban experience, the tunnels, bridges, fire-breathing factories, and the crush of patrons. Rail lines also advanced communications–telegraph lines frequently paralleled the rails–as well as American industry. In the latter case, they railroads were also a site for capital-labor conflict such as the Great Uprising of 1877, a significant nationwide general strike. It’s no coincidence that so many strikes took place among railroad workers. Theirs was hard work and the stress demands on engineers  were such that their jobs invaded their dreams.

 

Edward Hopper, Train Approaching a Tunnel

 

John Sloan, Six O'Clock

Otto Kohler ,Steel Valley Pittsburgh

 

Aaron Bohroad, Slag Heaps 1938

Joe Jones, All the Live Long Day

William Robinson Leigh, Attempt to Fire the PA RR Pittsburgh Roundhouse 1877

Thomas Hart Benton, Engineer's Dream 1931

 Railroads also spelled the end of the world known by Great Plains Indians, their counter-offensive notwithstanding. To this day historians debate the degree to which the railroad was a form of creative chaos or an instrument of genocide insofar as Native Americans were concerned. 

 

Henry Farny, Morning of a New Day 1907

 

In the end, urban Americans shaped the future, though Henry Ford literally paved the way to a post-rail society. Still, the railroad holds a romantic attachment in the minds of millions. Thoughts of train travel induces nostalgia and yearning in ways other forms transport seldom do. People still gawk inside Grand Central Station, but who lingers in the family garage or gets excited abut hanging out at an airport? 

Samuel Johnson Woolf, Under World 1910

 

You should see All Aboard if you can. After you have, walk down the hill to Shelburne Museum’s exhibit on Shelburne Station. Walk inside and imagine being a telegraph operator or sitting on a wooden bench with your luggage awaiting the train. It’s hard not to feel awe at the pistons and big wheels. 

 

 

Rob Weir