Utopian Realist

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store a novel by James McBride.  Riverhead Books.  385 pp.  *****

James McBride has written award-winning and bestselling novels in the past—The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong—also a highly acclaimed memoir, The Color of Water, but The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store—is a different kind of book altogether, beyond such rewards.  I would call it religious in the highest sense—not because it talks about Judaism and Christianity, though it does—but because it takes on the deepest questions of living.  I would also call it prophetic, a book which cries out to us to change our ways.

I expected to enjoy it, because I’ve loved McBride’s books in the past, but had no idea I would have this reaction, which began from the first page, or even before that.  From its intriguing dedication—”To Sy Friend, who taught all of us the meaning of Tikkun Olam”—I had the good luck to go directly to the Acknowledgements, which explains that dedication and sets the tone for the book.  I would suggest that any reader do that.  Although the Acknowledgements speak of about an actual human being who was important in McBride’s life and who does not appear in the book, these pages tell us the spirit in which he wrote this book.  It is a spirit we need at this moment in history.  Probably we always have.

I remember when we were young and just starting to love literature, my brother and I were thrilled with the review of a book which said it “moves like an express train and crackles with vibrant intensity.”  The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store moves like a horse-drawn wagon and has the intensity of a long hot summer afternoon.  It has such a leisurely pace that for long stretches we have no idea where the story is going.  We also don’t care.  It’s such a pleasure to inhabit this world that we don’t want the story to move on.  We want to stay right here.

Right here is a community called Chicken Hill in Pottsville, Pennsylvania in the 1930’s.  It is ostensibly the less desirable area of Pottsville, where people who are shunted aside—in this case, blacks and Jews—are allowed to live, though as the Jews grow prosperous they move on.  One woman who has stayed is Chona Ludlow, whose husband runs several successful theaters but who has resolutely refused to move, thought she easily could.  She stays where her grocery store is, which caters to poor people, gives them credit, and gives them a place to congregate.  She does that not out of charity or compassion, but because she prefers living among them.  Her husband Moshe would like to move, but he sees her deeper wisdom.

This is a novel where the poor and disadvantaged not only have a greater life force than advantaged whites, more joie de vivre, they also have a deeper intelligence that comes from their situation.  They see things from a different perspective.  If you want to understand white privilege and the way it makes white people dull and stupid, but don’t want to be lectured, this is the book to read.

That isn’t to say the white people are all bad and the blacks and the Jews virtuous and good.  This novel portrays people with all their flaws, everything from physical handicaps to psychological hangups to fundamental natures that are downright evil.  Chicken Hill is no easy place to live.  There is a sense of community—kept alive mostly by the women—that makes it a kind of paradise, one that is nevertheless full of heartbreak and difficulty.

The leisurely plot centers eventually around a ten-year-old black boy named Dodo, made deaf when a faulty oven in his house blew up, injuring both him and his mother.  His hearing never came back, and his mother—though given a settlement by the company who made the oven—eventually died, so Dodo has been taken in by a black couple named Nate Timblin and his wife Addie.  Nate is an all-purpose handyman for Moshe, setting up shows in his theaters and taking them down, and Addie is good friends with Chona, helping out at the grocery and looking after her when she is ill, as she tends to be; she is a polio survivor and walks with a severe limp.  A time comes when the white powers that be in Pottsville, for no reason I can see other than pure meanness, want to put Dodo into an institution, not just for deaf people but for all kinds of handicaps and mental illnesses, where he will most certainly be abused.  There’s no hope of defeating the powers that be in some conventional way.  There is only the ingenuity and determination of a few people in Chicken Hill.

Those who know McBride’s work will see that he was the perfect person to write this story.  The son of a black man and a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity (he tells that compelling story in The Color of Water), he understand those two cultures in a way that few people can.  McBride is also an accomplished musician and performer, so when he talks about the famous musicians who wander through Pottsville, he knows whereof he speaks.

The truly miraculous thing about this novel is the way that, simply by the story it tells, it argues for a world of acceptance, community, and love, where we see our interconnection and help each other.  With all of this community’s difficulties and abuses, seeing people just the way they are, it is nevertheless, in some way, a utopian novel.  If only we could live this way, we think as we read it.  At the same time, we see that we could.  If Addie can care for a Jewish woman as if she were her own mother, if Chona can love the poor black people around her as if she were one of them, if Nate can overcome a horrific past to give a deaf boy a chance he never had, we all can.  The novel shows us that.  But it does so without a trace of sentimentality.  It’s as realistic as Balzac.

On the night I began this novel, also on the night I finished, I couldn’t sleep.  I wasn’t troubled; my feeling was sheer elation.  There is a part of me that wants to sit down right now and read it again.  But I’m not sure I’m ready.