BOOKS: When Southern Gothic Is Real Life

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Charleston, South Carolina, has always been a city of two tales -- one white, the other black, running parallel, sometimes clashing but seldom touching. That is one reason why Ruthie Bolton's Gal: A True Life (Harcourt Brace; 275 pages; $19.95) is such a remarkable book, for it is the result of an unlikely collaboration between two writers -- one black and unpublished, the other white and well established. Gal is also remarkable as that one-in-a-million unsolicited manuscript that actually gets published. But most impressive is the book itself.

The author of Gal is a 33-year-old former employee at a plant nursery who is the wife of a restaurant worker and the mother of five children. She has adopted the pseudonym Ruthie Bolton to spare her family embarrassment over some of the raw events she writes about. Josephine Humphreys, 49, is a Charleston native and a highly regarded novelist. Her Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love and The Fireman's Fair have impressed readers and reviewers with their perceptiveness, their quiet humor and their blend of the courtly conservatism and racy spirits that have survived in and around that seductive old seaport for three centuries. Humphreys is married to a lawyer, has two sons at Harvard and lives in a green beachfront house on one of South Carolina's fragile barrier islands.

Humphreys does much of her writing at an office in an attractively ruinous building in Charleston that once housed Confederate widows. That is where the porter asked her if she would talk to Bolton about her "book." He had overheard Bolton discussing it at the nursery and said he knew someone who could help. At that point the effort consisted of 58 pages, handwritten on looseleaf paper and kept in a red folder marked "Parent Handbook" that Bolton's seven-year-old daughter had brought home from school.

Last week, sitting on a neighbor's screened porch with a view of Fort Sumter behind them, the two women recalled the beginning of their association and friendship. Advising unpublished writers is not Humphreys' glass of ice tea. "I found that I'm usually a hurt more than a help," she says. Yet she phoned Bolton and was immediately hooked by the voice she heard. "I loved its sound, bright and quick ... a strong story-telling voice," she says. Bolton had had only one other encounter with the literary world, when she contacted a vanity publisher whose ad she had seen. "They wanted $5,000," she says. "So I jumped off that one."

Inside the folder Humphreys found a sketchy narrative about a child abandoned by her 13-year-old mother and left to be raised by a grandmother who is beaten to death by her second husband. Daddy, as he is called, is not only a killer but a tyrant, an African-American Simon Legree, who turns Ruthie into a body servant. She shaves him, bathes him and cuts the calluses off his feet. When displeased -- which is often -- he beats her with the buckle end of a belt. The narrator was no angel either: she used drugs and traded sex for cash.