The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Source of book: I own this

 

This is actually the third James McBride book our book club has read, starting with Deacon King Kong and then Five-Carat Soul. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is McBride’s latest book. 

 

Like his others, in this one, McBride tackles some really heavy issues - racism, mistreatment of the disabled, the Klan, poverty, and violence against children. But as he always does, he manages to tell his story in a humorous and lighthearted way, keeping the coincidences right on the ragged edge of implausible, and ending with hope and community. 

 

I don’t think that I have ever done this before, but for this book, I will recommend reading the acknowledgments at the end, because he explains the inspiration for the book there. After reading it, you will see how one of his heroes in real life is represented in several of the characters in the book. 

 

The way McBride tells this story is interesting. We start off in the 1970s, when the demolition of an old black neighborhood for new condos leads to the discovery of a skeleton in an old well - with some red fabric and a mezuzah tchotchke on a necklace. The cops question the old Jewish guy, Malachi, who is the last of the Jews living on Chicken Hill, but he won’t tell them anything useful. Before they can come back, a hurricane floods everything, destroying the evidence - and afterward Malachi is nowhere to be found. 

 

And then, after that, we don’t hear much of anything about this body until much later in the story. The book flashes back to the 1930s, and spends the first third of the book describing characters and their back stories. It seems like there isn’t really a plot, until we find out that an explosion seen at a distances has made a young boy deaf. His mother has now died, and the State wants to put him in a mental institution. 

 

Who can keep the kid out of there? Well, it takes a village - or at least a neighborhood. But mostly Chona, the polio-crippled Jewish proprietor of the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and, more reluctantly, her husband, Moshe. 

 

From there, things happen pretty fast, and I won’t spoil them. 

 

The Chicken Hill neighborhood at that time consisted of two main groups. The Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, and the African American diaspora from the South. These groups mostly kept to themselves, but were brought together in a way by the kindness and generosity of Chona. 

 

The larger town that Chicken Hill is part of has other residents too: other immigrants, from Italy, Ireland, and other European nations. And the old guard - the white people who consider themselves special because their ancestors came on the Mayflower (at least that’s what they claim - who knows if it was true or not.) 

 

The book is told by an unnamed and semi-omniscient narrator, but it looks at things from the points of view of numerous characters. None of the characters knows everything (and literally nobody knows about the body in the well), so all perspectives are incomplete. Ultimately, that includes the narrator and the reader - there are a number of questions which are never answered. Others are hinted at, but never explicitly stated. 

 

McBride draws on his own heritage for this story. His African-American father died of cancer months before James was born. He was raised by his Jewish mother, an immigrant from Poland, in Brooklyn’s housing projects. It was, shall we say, a very multicultural upbringing. Because of his parentage, he was exposed to both Jewish culture and religion, and the Black Christianity of his preacher father’s family. All of these things make it into his books. 

 

There is a lot going on in the book, and the fun is in discovering not merely what will happen, but how the various characters will contribute. 

 

McBride isn’t preachy, but he definitely puts his own philosophy into the book. Often this is in the voice of a character, but sometimes, the narrator breaks the fourth wall and just says stuff to the reader. (That’s how you get a complaint about electronic devices in a book set mostly in the 1930s.) Everything is characteristic for McBride - you can tell it is one he wrote within a few paragraphs. 

 

There are so many great lines in this book. Here are the ones I found the most interesting. The first comes when Moshe is trying to get advertisements for his Klezmer concert at his theater published in surrounding cities. (His theaters host both Jewish music and - scandalously - Black performers as well.) One of the recurring issues in the book is that Jewish immigrants are not monolithic - they don’t even speak the same language. Some speak Yiddish, others the languages of their country of origin - Lithuanian, Polish, German, Russian - and few of them are great in English. (At least the older generation - immigrant kids always pick up the new language well.) 

 

Because of this, a Yiddish advertisement gets sent to The Baltimore Sun by accident, and a teenage Hungarian intern is given the task of translating it using his very limited knowledge of Yiddish. 

 

Thus, the original, which read, “Come see the great Mickey Katz. Once-in-a-lifetime event. Family fun and Jewish memories. Red-hot Klezmer like you’ve never heard before.” - comes out as, “Mickey Katz is coming. Once a life, always a life. Watch the Jews burn and dance and have fun.” 

 

Yeah, that’s not….quite right. 

 

Moshe falls in love with Chona, and they get married. She inherits her parents’ store. Moshe wants to move out of Chicken Hill - as the other Jews are once they make enough to afford a better neighborhood. 

 

“You don’t have to spend your life selling kosher cow meat and onions to coloreds. Let’s close the store. The Jews are leaving the Hill. Let’s follow them.”

“Where?”

“Down the hill to town. Where the Americans are.”

“Which Americans?” 

 

Oh, that is the question, isn’t it? And so much so these days, when the Trumps of the world say “American” but mean “white.” 

 

Malachi is an interesting Jewish character, who can’t entirely decide if he hates living in America more than living in Europe. He finds America too dirty, although we never really find out what he means by that. But there is another thing that Malachi says that is fascinating:

 

“I think the Negroes have the advantage in this country. At least they know who they are.” 

 

The villain of the book is Doc Roberts, the local doctor - and leader of the Klan in town. He is more complicated than just a villain, though - that’s true of all of McBride’s characters. In many ways, though, he is a stand-in for MAGA sorts and other white supremacists who think they mean well - the type that has unfortunately been a common sort of American for centuries. Here is how McBride describes his angst as he ages. 

 

He’d seen his youth vanish, his town crumble, the blood of his proud white fathers diluted by invaders: Jews, Italians, even niggers who wandered Chicken Hill selling ice cream and shoes to one another while decent white people fought off the Jewish merchants and Italian immigrants who seemed to be buying everything. Not to mention the Mennonites in town with their horses and buggies. And the Irish at the fire company. And Greeks mumbling their business at diners. And Italians kicking ass at the dairy. And niggers from the Hill wanting factory jobs instead of being maids and janitors like they were supposed to. Now Jews were buying homes on Beech Street, making plans to build a bigger Jewish synagogue, and what’s more, they were polluting the town’s good white Christian teenagers with Negro music - jazz - brought to town by none other than Chona’s husband, yet another Jew who owned not one but two theaters. Where was America in all this? Pottstown was for Americans. The Bible had said it. Jesus! Where was Jesus in all this? Doc felt his world was falling apart. 

So a few years after medical school when friends approached him about attending a meeting of the Knights of Pottstown to spread good Christian values, he agreed. And when that Knights of Pottstown meeting actually turned out to be the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan instead, he saw no difference. The men were like him. They wanted to preserve America. This country was woods before the white man came. It needed to be rescued from those who wanted to pollute the pure white race with ignorance and dirt, fouling things up by mixing the pure WASP heritage with the Greeks, the Italians, the Jews who had murdered their precious Jesus Christ, and the niggers who dreamed of raping white women and whose lustful black women were a danger to every decent, God-fearing white man. 

 

It is sad to me that this way of thinking hasn’t gone away, and now is the central “value” of one of our major political parties, which has gone full-on Fascist in their desperation to “preserve” the white America they think we should be. And, of course, claiming Jesus and the Bible in support of their racism. 

 

But the times keep a-changin’ whether you consent to it or not. Moshe finds this out later in the book, when he realizes that public taste in “negro” music has changed. Out is the old swing stuff, in is the new Latin-infused fusion. After he guesses wrong about which of two acts to make the headliner, the leader of the new hot band explains to Moshe the problem, who seems puzzled about all the “Spanish” people.  

 

“To you, they’re Spanish. To me, they’re Puerto Rican, Dominican, Panamanian, Cuban, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Africano, Afro-Cubano. A lot of different things. A lot of different sounds mixed together. That’s America, mijo. You got to know your people, Moshe.” 

 

McBride also paints the African-American community as far from homogenous. One guy, for example, is described as a “Booker T. Washington-type proper Negro,” while the folks on Chicken Hill are viewed by the residents of a neighboring town as “uppity NAACP sorts.” 

 

I won’t spoil exactly the context, but Fatty (the Black juke-joint proprietor) and Big Soap (his Italian buddy) end up with a midnight task that is nowhere near legal, but also not exactly wrong. (Depending on your perspective.) As they set off, Soap’s fellow Italian, Miss Fioria, senses that they know something about the occurrence between Doc and Chona that they aren’t telling, and sends them off with a warning. 

 

“So what did she say then?”

“She said God is watching what we do.”

Fatty sighed. “I’d rather have Him holding me to charge than her.”

 

Nate, the good man with a dark past and a smoldering temper, warns his wife about talking too much about the event. 

 

“Goddamnit, you’ll sport real trouble fooling with these white folks’ lies. Stay out of it. Can’t nothing be done.” 

 

Nate has done time in prison, so he understands when he says “Differing weights mean differing measures. The Lord knows ‘em both.” Justice is not equal. 

 

Miggy, the fortune teller from the lower-class neighborhood, also expresses an interesting opinion. The Lowgod family (which makes up nearly all the neighborhood one way or another) has been employed at the local mental institution, in part because they are willing to put up with the gross stuff. 

 

“And most of your colored workers out there is from the Row. You know why? Your basic Chicken Hill colored wants to eat their food off the high fryer. They aiming to be high siddity like white folks. But pretending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling block to your own justice. Your basic Lowgod don’t care about that. Us Lowgods understand that when them patients at Pennhurst throw their poop at us, or pisses on the floor, or spits at us, they ain’t got no peace. They understand what most people in this land don’t: that you can’t restore what you ain’t never had. Living on a land that ain’t yours, pretending to know everything when you don’t, making up rules for this or that to make yourself seem big, that puts a terrible strain on a body. This land don’t belong to the people that rules it, see. And it’s made some of ‘em, the best of ‘em, the most honest of ‘em, it’s made ‘em crazy.” 

 

I also thought a line from Bernice, Fatty’s sister, who has a bunch of kids from different fathers, about the lies we parents tell ourselves sometimes, was good. 

 

“But I’m no worse than these other mothers out here who pray, ‘Lord, let my child be wise and good’ when they really mean ‘Let this child have more power and money than I have.” 

 

I’ll end with a humorous exchange between Big Soap and Fatty. 

 

“Soap, you wanna make some dough?”

“No, Fatty, I wanna wander the earth spreading joy and life. Of course I wanna make some dough.” 

 

I definitely enjoyed this book. James McBride is reliably excellent and thoughtful, and hopeful and humorous in the bargain. We need as much humanity as we can get in these hateful and dehumanizing times. McBride, coming from hard times as he did, is able to see past all the horribles and find the love and hope. 

 

***

 

I keep forgetting to mention that James McBride also played saxophone in The Rock Bottom Remainders, a touring band consisting of writers, including Dave Barry, Amy Tan, and Stephen King. I read a lot of Dave Barry as a kid and young adult, and learned about the band from his column. I finally got around to reading my first Stephen King novel this month.