THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406240475
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
DATELINE: 940626 LENGTH: Medium
A True Life
{REST} RUTHIE BOLTON
Harcourt Brace. 275 pp. $19.95.
\ \ IN THE MEMOIR Gal, Ruthie Bolton gives voice to young people whose actions are usually heard more clearly than their words: children who come to school without lunch, who steal, who use drugs, who become parents before their own childhoods are over.
Bolton herself was such a child. Unlike so many, though, she grew into an adult who speaks the story that underlies those actions: a tale of alienation and abuse. But her story also includes a powerful determination to survive and to love.
The child of a 13-year-old girl, Bolton was born in 1961 in the mostly black Hungry Neck neighborhood of Charleston, S.C., where ``the streets were all nothing but dirt, they didn't even have no street signs or anything like that.''
Her family's indifference threatened to erase any sense of self. She notes that ``I had three brothers, but I never knew them. Every time my mother did get pregnant, she would give the kids away. She never kept nobody, she just gave them away. Why, I don't know.''
Even her nickname, Gal, arose out of harshness rather than affection. ``They called me Gal, because of one time I wandered past the yard and my grandfather hollered `Get that gal out the street'. . . ''
In her mother's absence, Bolton ultimately became the responsibility of her stepgrandfather, a Navy cook called ``Daddy.'' Daddy earned military honors for his work, but at home, he displayed another side - a sadistic brutality that forced perverse tasks, such as scraping fungus from his feet, and punishments that included pushing a child's face into a toilet.
Bolton tells how privation - both physical and emotional - drove her into troublemaking.
``Ivy's mother would always fix her a good lunch, a good lunch all the time, and Francene Topp's mother would fix a good lunch. I never brought lunch to school. . . So when they had to go to the bathroom or we go out to recess, I would steal their lunch, and I would steal their lunch money, I would sneak in their purse, I did, I just took their things.''
Bolton began drinking and using drugs at a very early age. She had a child while in her teens. But she also managed to finish school, to leave the abusive Daddy, find employment and eventually marry a man whose family gives her the love she never had.
In a particularly touching passage, Bolton mentions that this adulthood love, while welcome, came too late. ``I wanted it already, to have happened to me when I was little. That is a hard thing to explain - that I want it, but I want it then. I want somebody, when I was a kid, to touch me on the leg or shoulder and say `Ruthie, how you doing?' ''
Bolton's memoir doesn't explain why she survived the kind of childhood that dooms so many people. But her lively narrative conveys a force that clearly speaks of her innate strength.
Indeed, Gal truly is a narrative. Bolton related it orally to well-known Charleston author Josephine Humphreys. The two women met when the groundskeeper in Humphreys' office building told Humphreys about an employee at a local plant store who was writing an autobiography.
In the book's foreword, Humphreys explains that the manuscript Bolton was keeping in a school notebook ``outlined the extraordinary events of Ruthie's childhood - but she was having trouble saying the things she really wanted to say.''
The two decided that Bolton would ``try another way of telling, the way southern stories are best told: out loud, teller-to-listener.'' Humphreys taped the narrative and then transcribed it. Because of the revealing nature of the memoir, the narrator chose to protect her family's privacy by using the pseudonym ``Ruthie Bolton.''
The abuse described in Gal may make the reader flinch and want to put the book down. It's important to keep reading, because Bolton relates a life story that, sadly, is likely shared by many whose fates go unnoticed. Gal adds to the understanding of the human experience. by CNB