CHARACTER
The Berry Pickersby Amanda Peters

Ruthie

Ruthie / Norma

Quick Facts

  • Role: Protagonist; a Mi’kmaw girl abducted in 1962 and raised under a new name
  • First appearance: The opening berry-picking scene in Maine, where she vanishes
  • Also known as: Norma (the name given by her abductive/adoptive parents)
  • Family ties: Youngest daughter in a large Mi’kmaw family; beloved sister of Joe
  • Adoptive home: Raised by Lenore and Frank in a white, middle-class household
  • Key confidantes: Aunt June in adolescence and adulthood
  • Birth family anchors: Joe’s Mother and her eldest brother Ben

Who They Are

Both child and cipher, both Ruthie and Norma, she is the novel’s quiet center—someone whose life has been split in two yet keeps searching for a single, true self. Her story gathers the book’s major currents into one body: the ache of Family, Loss, and Grief, the lifelong pull of Identity and Belonging, the haunt of Memory and Trauma, and the corrosive weight of Secrets and Lies. As a Mi’kmaw child taken and raised by a white couple, she also stands as a living emblem of the broader Indigenous Experience and Injustice—a single life bearing the imprint of state-sanctioned removal, cultural dislocation, and the endurance of kinship.

Personality & Traits

Norma’s surface is serenity—bookish, observant, careful—but beneath it moves a deep current of uncertainty seeded by stolen origins. Her watchfulness, empathy, and restraint are survival strategies learned in a home governed by love that is also possession. The resulting self is resilient and tender, yet slow to trust intimacy; she carries grief that is not only her own.

  • Quiet, trusting child: As Ruthie, she sits eating on a rock—small, sweet, and open to the world—which makes her vulnerable to Lenore’s approach. The family’s “uncanny” resemblance through her mother’s face underscores her rootedness before the rupture.
  • Outsider’s gaze: As Norma, she notices she is “so brown” next to her pale parents. Frank’s invented tale about an Italian ancestor and the landowner’s “lighter than your others” remark show how adults overwrite her perceptions.
  • Intellect turned inward: Fascinated by genetics and earlobes that match neither parent, she seeks empirical reassurance to explain an existential ache—a child’s science project against a life-sized secret.
  • Guilt-conditioned compliance: Lenore’s fear-based affection teaches Norma to accommodate, apologize, and minimize desire; the dreams that persist mark the mind’s refusal to comply.
  • Resilience and empathy: After losing her own baby, she absorbs grief that mirrors both her mothers. The loss ends her marriage but expands her capacity to recognize sorrow in others.
  • Courage to integrate: From the Boston protest to the final drive north, she moves from confusion to choice—reclaiming the name Ruthie and choosing a self that contains both lives.

Character Journey

Ruthie begins in abundance—one child among many, beloved and held—until a single act cleaves her life. As Norma, her childhood becomes a study in misfit: summer-browned skin in a pale home, “dreams” that are memories, explanations that never quite fit. Adolescence intensifies the split; she seeks freedom at college and in books, yet carries the guilt that Lenore’s anxious love plants in her. Adulthood brings marriage and then devastating loss; the death of her child teaches her the shape of grief from the inside. After Frank’s death, Lenore’s dementia loosens the story she’s policed for decades. Norma follows the frayed thread through June’s confession to the truth: she was stolen, not chosen. The revelation is shattering, but clarifying—naming the loneliness she could never locate. Driving to Nova Scotia, she practices her birth name until it feels earned. Walking into her childhood home, she begins the work of integration: Ruthie and Norma, one life at last.

Key Relationships

  • Lenore: Norma’s relationship with her adoptive mother is intimate and suffocating, made of tenderness braided with theft. Lenore’s love arises from grief and control; she keeps Norma close by teaching her fear and indebtedness. In the end, Lenore’s slipping memory becomes a paradoxical grace, releasing the truth she refused to speak and giving Norma permission to leave—and return as herself.

  • Joe: As Ruthie’s brother and the last to see her, Joe lives under the shadow of Guilt and Atonement. His lifelong search mirrors her lifelong drift; each holds half a story the other needs. Their late reunion is both absolution and homecoming—Joe’s certainty that she existed somewhere becomes Ruthie’s certainty of where she belongs.

  • Aunt June: To Norma, June is a window: a freer life, fewer rules, and worldly curiosity. Yet June is also complicit; in Boston she literally pulls Norma away from the truth. Her eventual confession costs Norma trust but ultimately guides Ruthie back to her family, making June both betrayer and bridge.

  • Joe’s Mother: She is the silhouette in Norma’s “dark dream,” a figure the mind won’t let go. Their reunion is immediate and bodily—shared features, shared loss—collapsing fifty years of separation into recognition. Through her, Ruthie experiences a mother’s grief as love that waited, not vanished.

  • Ben: His conviction that he saw Ruthie at a Boston protest is dismissed for decades, marking the family’s painful dance between hope and doubt. Ben’s stubborn belief becomes retroactive proof that Ruthie’s thread never broke; it was simply lost in the tangle.

Defining Moments Ruthie/Norma’s story turns on small, precise pivots—each moment a clue, each clue a door.

  • The Disappearance (1962): A four-year-old on a rock, a sandwich, a grieving stranger—Lenore takes her. Why it matters: It forges two timelines that will strain to reunite, and it saturates every later choice with the aftershock of theft.

  • The “Dreams”: Sunlit car, dark campfire—the “dreams” are memories. Why it matters: The psyche refuses erasure; memory finds forms the conscious mind can bear, insisting on truth without language.

  • The Boston Protest: A man calls “Ruthie” again and again; June pulls Norma away. Why it matters: Recognition nearly happens in a public crowd—history brushing against the present—revealing how adults keep secrets not only in houses but on streets.

  • The Child’s Death: Norma loses her baby and her marriage unravels. Why it matters: Personal grief becomes a bridge to ancestral grief, preparing her to understand her mothers and to face love without illusions.

  • The Unraveling: Frank dies; Lenore’s dementia surfaces the story; June finally speaks. Why it matters: The gatekeepers falter, and the narrative of “adoption” collapses under the weight of unquiet memory.

  • The Reunion in Nova Scotia: She walks into her childhood home, meets siblings and mother, and tries on her own name. Why it matters: Claiming “Ruthie” is not rejection of “Norma” but integration—belonging as an action, not a blood test.

Essential Quotes

I think I’ve always known that something was out of place. But when I was young, I understood it was me. Then I quickly forgot why. And the dreams persisted. This is the emotional blueprint of Norma’s life: mistaking systemic rupture for personal flaw. The “dreams” that persist show memory doing covert repair work until the truth can be faced.

"Why am I so brown?" I stood at my mother’s feet, her arm slung over her eyes. "You guys are so white and I’m so brown." A child asks a scientific question and gets a myth in return. The moment captures how racialized difference becomes a daily riddle, and how adults’ evasions train Norma to distrust her own perception.

"Are you telling me that my mother kidnapped me?" She was quiet. "Aunt June, for fuck’s sake, talk." The staccato dialogue enacts the shock of revelation and the long, complicit silence around it. Norma demands language—naming the harm is the first step toward reclaiming herself.

"I think I am, as well," I said. "Now, I don’t want to talk on here about your past—it’s long distance and that’s expensive. But I want to ask you a question." "Okay." "You ever been to an Indian rights protest in Boston?" The practical absurdity—long-distance charges during a life-altering disclosure—heightens the tension between ordinary life and extraordinary truth. The Boston protest resurfaces as evidence that her two timelines have already crossed once.

I sat softly, unsure of what I was supposed to say next. It was strange hearing someone else call me Ruthie. I’d said the name over and over again on my drive from Boston to Nova Scotia, whispered it, spoke it aloud, yelled it at one point. I’d even introduced myself as Ruthie when I stopped at a diner in New Brunswick. It was starting to sound familiar, like it finally belonged to me. Naming here is ritual. By rehearsing “Ruthie,” she converts a fact into a self—language as a bridge between histories. The passage captures integration in real time: hesitation yielding to possession, estrangement to belonging.