The American mixing bowl
der his shirt.
While Moshe insists that America is “clean, clean, clean — far cleaner than Europe,” Malachi soon concludes that America is “too dirty” for him. Malachi says this while watching a young Black boy nicknamed Dodo assiduously clean the dance floor of Moshe’s popular jazz and blues hall — a beacon for Black entertainers and audiences, and a bane of Pottstown’s white establishment. Noting the time of day, it occurs to Malachi that the boy should be in school. Malachi, then, quickly comes to another conclusion: “I think the Negroes have the advantage in this country.” When Moshe asks him why, Malachi replies: “At least they know who they are.”
Actually, many of Pottstown’s Black protagonists know who they are not. Nate Timblin, Moshe’s righthand-man and Dodo’s uncle, for one, does not make any claims on the land of his birth. “He was a man without a country,” writes McBride of Nate — a strong silent type, his demeanor “a quiet that covered a kind of tempest.” But every seeming disadvantage comes with its gifts, “for having no country meant no involvement and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head […].” His self-reliance does not spring from a romantic attachment to nonconformity, but is borne of resilience.
This sensibility is epitomized by the Lowgods on Hemlock Row, “a tiny hamlet of black life that most Chicken Hill blacks avoided.” Devoid of “moving-on-up” ambitions of “NAACP-type Negroes,” the Lowgods were “said to be from South Carolina someplace,” and “grew their own vegetables, tended their own animals, and kept their own counsel.” As Miggy Fludd, a Lowgod who tells fortunes for her brethren, puts it: “We are visitors here.” Yet, again, Fludd appreciates the blessing in what might otherwise seem to be a curse: “Living on 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 the body.”
The strain Fludd describes, which variously afflicts many Pottstown residents, arises from the existential attempt to become American — an unremitting quest that demands more than the right papers. Whether Black and immigrant denizens up the hill, or the white establishment “down the hill,” many of McBride’s charismatic characters suffer from it.
Then again, every impairment begets some heightened sensibility to compensate. “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” illustrates this through numerous characters with physical disabilities. Moshe’s wife, Chona, the proprietor of the novel’s eponymous store, has a chronic limp from childhood polio. Unable to move unhampered like her peers, she develops a voracious reading habit, and later evolves into an advocate for civil rights in Chicken Hill. So, Chona compensates for her limp with enhanced knowledge and compassion.
Another character with a limp named Doc Roberts, however, compensates in a completely different way. As far as the town doctor is concerned, the Black and immigrant residents of Chicken Hill do not simply live there, but have occupied it. “Wine stains on the white American table cloth is what they were,” the doctor ruminates on his neighbors. Doc Roberts’ halting gait easily gives him away during marches with the local Ku Klux Klan, his disguises notwithstanding.
If disability is a metaphor in “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” then McBride portrays how it is up to each person to determine what quality they will cultivate in an attempt to neutralize its effects — with resilience and sensitivity, or arrogance and a false sense of superiority. It’s a testament to McBride’s masterful storytelling that, by the end of the book, all that “who-shot-John nonsense” with the skeleton down the well hardly matters anymore. By this point, the well is more meaningful for what it symbolizes — a crossroads of heaven, earth, and the underworld, and the way each person must direct his fate by plumbing his own depths.