James McBride’s new novel entertains while getting deep about equality
At the opening of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” Pennsylvania state troopers find a skeleton at the bottom of an old well. Such putrid circumstances promise a grim tale, but this is a book by James McBride. If anyone can make those moldy bones dance, it’s him.
Ever since his memoir, “The Color of Water” (1995), became a fixture of American literature, there’s been an element of exuberance bordering on the miraculous in McBride’s work. Vitality thrums through his stories even in the shadows of despair. “The Good Lord Bird,” his irrepressible novel about abolitionist John Brown, rightly won a National Book Award in 2013. And “Deacon King Kong,” about a sprawling cast in and around a Brooklyn housing project, was one of the great joys of 2020.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” confirms the abiding strength of McBride’s vernacular narrative. With his eccentric, larger-than-life characters and outrageous scenes of spliced tragedy and comedy, “Dickensian” is not too grand a description for his novels, but the term is ultimately too condescending and too Anglican. The melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own, steeped in our country’s complex racial tensions and alliances. Surely, the time is not too far distant when we’ll refer to other writers’ hypnotically entertaining stories as McBridean.
His new novel takes place before and during the Depression, in a ramshackle Pennsylvania neighborhood called Chicken Hill, where Jewish immigrants and African Americans cling to the deferred dream of equality in the United States. Moshe Ludlow is a wannabe impresario from Romania married to Chona, a polio survivor with a pronounced limp. He has a radical idea: The goyim won’t like it, but what if he opened his All-American Dance Hall and Theater to Black patrons?
By silent decree, African Americans were forbidden in downtown businesses except as janitors and maids, but as soon as the band starts up, Moshe’s somber new guests “frolicked and laughed, dancing as if they were birds enjoying flight for the first time.”
Unsurprisingly, that success inspires considerable opposition from the area’s racists and antisemites, but Moshe persists, and his entertainment empire expands fast — so fast, in fact, that he can afford to think about moving out of their little apartment above the old Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. But Chona won’t abandon the neighborhood. What’s more shocking to the town gossips, she insists on running the grocery store herself. Her goodness endears her to Moshe. And exasperates him.
“This area is poor. Which we are not,” Moshe says. “It is Negro. Which we are not. We are doing well!”
“Because we serve, you see?” Chona insists. “That is what we do. The Talmud says it. We must serve.”
Moshe acquiesces — as he knew he always would — and they stay in Chicken Hill. There is no negotiating with his wife’s “charity of mind.”
McBride, whose mother was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, is wholly committed to this theme, which feels simultaneously inspirational and, alas, nostalgic. The folks of Chicken Hill regard Chona’s friendship with Black residents as “proof of the American possibility of equality: we all can get along no matter what.” But that goal is brutally tested in “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”
If there’s a ramshackle quality to McBride’s plotting, it’s the artful precariousness of a genius. His expansive collection of ominous, preposterous and saintly characters twirls like loose sticks in a river, guided by a physics of chaos beyond all calculation except awe. There are hilarious set pieces reminiscent of the mechanicals in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thrilling episodes that recall Eliza’s escape in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and dreadful moments that rival Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.” From celebration to calamity, from farce to affliction, the novel is swept along by the raw eloquence of McBride’s voice.
The moral engine driving all this activity is Chona, the daughter of a rabbi who taught her to be generous and principled. She regularly irritates the town’s White power brokers by promoting Jewish causes, denouncing the local KKK and reading “her socialism books and crazy-women nonsense.” Indeed, her devotion to the neighborhood’s Black residents precipitates a crisis designed by McBride for maximum emotional impact.
At the center of the novel is a sweet 12-year-old orphan nicknamed Dodo who lost his hearing — and his mother — after a kitchen stove exploded. If that plaintive figure sounds downright Victorian, just wait. With a gross disregard for Dodo’s intellectual abilities, state officials are determined to send the boy to a special school, which the folks of Chicken Hill know isn’t a school at all but rather a harrowing institution ruled by a violent fiend called the Son of Man.
It’s no surprise who’s willing to help hide the Black boy from that horror. For childless Chona, Dodo is not a legal risk but an answer to a prayer. “He’d come as a matter of conscience,” McBride writes, but she regards him as “a matter of love.” In just a few months, “he had become a living embodiment of l’chaim, a toast to life.” Let the state inspector come snooping around her store for Dodo. “Chona had no fear of the government,” McBride writes.
But there are plenty of reasons to be afraid, and the novel’s descriptions of the Pennhurst State Hospital for the Insane and Feeble-Minded will make any reader blanch. I wish I could say McBride was exaggerating, but I don’t think so. When my wife and I were looking for special schools and day care for our elder daughter, who has cerebral palsy, we saw facilities that could have been designed by Hieronymus Bosch. Back in the 1930s, especially in poor and poorly regulated towns, such institutions were surely even worse.
In his acknowledgments, McBride notes that this novel was inspired by a very different place: an enlightened camp for disabled children where he worked when he was in college. He writes, “Lessons of inclusivity, love, and acceptance — delivered not with condescending kindness but with deeds that showed the recipients the path to true equality — remained with me for the rest of my life.”
Indeed, it’s that clear-eyed vision of physical disability subsumed by transcendent bliss that raises “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” above the sentimentality that too often clings to stories involving the differently abled. McBride challenges us to picture what he calls “the dazzling carnival of life ... the hooting, the clapping, the yelling, the cheering, the howling, the crutches being waved in the air, the gorgeous cacophony of humanity in wheelchairs, some wearing special eyeglasses, others in hearing aids, signing and gesturing, the winks and chortles and grunts of pleasure, the grimaces and shaking of heads and excited howling of those without ‘normal’ ability. It’s impossible to describe.”
No, it’s not, as McBride proves here.
We all need — we all deserve — this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.