The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, 2023

Pottstown, PA, despite its name, was no melting pot in 1936, the year in which The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is set. Not even the area’s smelting industries could liquefy hard racial, religious, and ethnic barriers. Blacks are mostly stuck on Chicken Hill, the open-sewers and mud-streets neighborhood. Residents there are divided between long-time inhabitants and recent arrivals from the South. White Protestants live downtown and send their maids and janitors back to the Hill after work. Just one Italian Catholic family still resides there. Only a few Jews, also mainly recent arrivals, live on the Hill, and the Jews are even more divided along ethnic lines—Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, a Romanian named Moshe Ludlow who is one of McBride’s several protagonists. But over a few months situations arise that it takes a village to resolve—a murder mystery, an attempted rape, the kidnapping of a child, even getting clean water to Chicken Hill.

McBride is often called an unusually “humane” writer. This quality is made more explicit than ever in the first and in the final words of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. McBride dedicates the book to Sy Friend, “who taught all of us the meaning of Tikkun Olam,” translated from Hebrew as “repair the world.” In his Acknowledgments, McBride identifies Friend as “the retired director” of a camp for Handicapped Children where the author worked during his summers as a college student. “Sy’s lessons of inclusivity, love, and acceptance,” McBride writes, have “remained with me for the rest of my life.” The character with whom “Tikkun Olam” is associated is Moshe Ludlow’s wife Chona who runs the store and allows needy Black customers to run up charges Chona never expects them to pay.

Humane doesn’t mean sentimental. Chona writes fiery letters to the local paper complaining about KKK marches, and she becomes irritated with the mild Moshe for his fears of local government (even though Moshe does book Black acts into his theater and allows entry to residents of Chicken Hill). The first village-needing situation arises when a boy—the 12-year-old orphaned nephew of Moshe’s Black handyman and friend Nate—is threatened by the state with removal from Nate and his wife’s care. Called “Dodo” because he lost his hearing in a stove accident, the boy may be consigned to a notorious nearby asylum, one that recalls the horrible home for boys in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. McBride comes closest to sentimentality when Dodo meets a more severely handicapped boy Dodo calls “Monkey Pants.”

Chona agrees to hide Dodo. When a state official catches on, Chona asks her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Bernice, a Black woman with eight children, to let Dodo mix in with her brood when an official comes looking. The situation becomes more serious when Dodo attacks a white doctor trying to rape Chona. After the well-meaning Dodo is captured and sent to the asylum, more villagers--as well as Moshe’s rich Philadelphia cousin, Jewish socialist railroad workers, and some Gullah-speaking Blacks who live outside Pottstown--are needed to attempt Dodo’s rescue.

Humane can often employ the melodramatic, and the Dodo plot might be if it were not the backside of McBride’s patchwork quilt of characters, some comic, some eccentric, some just plotlessly living along as they see fit—characters like those in McBride’s previous novel about the “village” of a Brooklyn housing project, Deacon King Kong. An Italian called “Big Soap” is a lunkhead needed by Fatty Davis, the Black owner of a “jook joint” and a multi-tasking hustler, if the Hill’s water supply is to be repaired. Bernice is proud of being “saved” and unbothered by the fact of her eight children by three fathers. The Lithuanian twin shoemakers cause trouble in the shul but cooperate with other villagers. A failed baker and would-be Hasidic rabbi named Malachi pops in and out of Pottstown like a character by Sholem Aleichem.

Malachi is a constant reader and quoter of texts. Chona is also a devoted reader. Since many of the Black characters can’t read and don’t avail themselves of other media, they talk and talk and talk—McBride’s literary signatures, dialogue and dialect. One of the fast talkers is a young woman (probably a prostitute) whom the residents of Chicken Hill call “Paper” because she offers news of downtown doings and gossip about Chicken Hill. Another is Miggy Fludd, who used to be a laundress before she started telling fortunes and typing them out on cards most of her customers can’t read. Fatty Davis is the clever talker, quick with insults and witticisms. I think it’s not too strong to say that McBride invents plots so he can assemble characters, not necessarily to talk about the plots, but just to talk with one another and, sometimes, cross over those barriers that make a village hard to create in Pennsylvania or in a novel.

The prominence of Jewish characters in McBride’s novel isn’t a surprise if one has read or even knows about his memoir The Color of Water that honors his Jewish mother and her mother who, like Chona, was partly crippled and ran a store in a Black neighborhood. Moshe and his cousin Isaac in Philadelphia love music and bring in famous performers to their theaters, but rabbi Feldman in Pottstown is a horrible cantor and it’s Bernice who sings best. The Jews in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store just don’t have the music of counter-punching orality that the jazz musician McBride most loves to write—and reportedly plays on stage at his readings. Here is an exchange between Fatty Davis and “Paper”:

“Addie and Nate are planning to free that boy. And you gonna help,” says Paper.

“Who am I, Abraham Lincoln?”

“Stop playing dumb. They plan on breakin’ Dodo out the nuthouse.”

“Sure. And I quit selling oil wells last year.”

“Nate got it set up to send him down to South Carolina after we get him out.”

“We?”

“That’s right. I need you to run me over to Hemlock Row tonight. I’ll pay for the gas.”

“Hemlock Row? I know bums living in packing houses who wouldn’t go over there.”

“Why not?”

“Them rusty-skinned niggers is setting over there doing hoodoo and eating butter beans and white livers as we speak. No thanks.”

The few families of Blacks in Hemlock Row are a village. Transplanted from South Carolina, they refuse to be servants in Pottstown. Called “Lowgods,” they are “private, suspicious, unpredictable, and kept to themselves. They grew their own vegetables, tended their own animals, and kept their own counsel. They walked different. They talked different.” This doesn’t mean the Lowgods couldn’t produce the novel’s villain, who calls himself “Son of Man,” or the character, not to be named here, who kills him.

Every so often McBride’s 21st century voice breaks through the voices of his characters and makes fairly obvious generalizations about the effects of racism and religious prejudice, conclusions that would not be news to his 1930s characters or his contemporary readers. The authorial interventions unfortunately imply that representation of a variegated group struggling to be humane is not sufficient. In McBride’s National Book Award-winning Good Lord Bird, he had John Brown to do the lecturing. Chona’s early speeches would have been enough in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. McBride didn’t need to have her on her deathbed imagine first a hot dog, forbidden food, and then “not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog.”

When I interviewed Toni Morrison many decades ago, she said she wanted to write “village literature, fiction that is for the village, for the tribe,” novels that could be read and understood by the Black characters within the books, readers without high-level educations. She had difficulty hewing to this ideal. Though I haven’t read all of McBride’s work, I think Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store are what Morrison had in mind. The point of view in both skips around from character to character, but always in easy-to-read third person. Plots are several but not difficult to track as they overlap. Setting is stable. Flashbacks are few. These techniques—perhaps even more evident in Deacon King Kong than in this new book – allow the author to foreground what Morrison said was the most important aspect of village literature, its style: “The language must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them… I know the standard English. I want to use it to help restore the other language, the lingua franca.”

Tikkun Olam: a humane literary project--remember, restore, and repair the language that existed before those pocket-size hot dogs.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels and Harpooning Donald Trump (essays).