what we read: The Heaven and Earth that Sustain Us

Title: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Author: James McBride

Our meeting this month was a mix of laughter, grief over the losses suffered by two of our members, enthusiastic discussion, and pie-eating. Having taken our host's request for "an attractive outfit" seriously, Steve presented himself in full cross-country skiing regalia, having found ways to ski this year even though there's no snow or ice anywhere. After a brief kerfuffle caused by demonstrations of ski footwear and a Lego Ghostbusters hearse, lunch-serving and eating, and technical "why the heck won't the laptop camera work?" difficulties, we dove into our hybrid meeting, with three of our members Zooming in via the tiny screen of Steve's phone.

From the publisher:

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us."

Insights and Opinions

+ Right from the start of our conversation, it was clear that this book was a favorite of many of us. Chris had started affixing tabs to pages she thought were funny but ultimately gave up once she figured there would be tabs on every page. Steve took 14 pages of notes. Lois, who had read it before, reread it in preparation for our meeting and loved it even more the second time. Liz was so invested in the characters and their fate that she skipped ahead to the end to reassure herself before going back to finish in the right order.

+ Steve noted similarities between McBride's method and that of August Wilson. "Both will take their time and drop in a set piece that delays the story, but it's always worth it," he noted.

+ Liz was struck by the extent to which McBride tells his story primarily through dialog. His chapters open with a bit of back story to set the scene, but then slide into a conversation between people where all of the important points and much of the history are revealed. As a result, there is significant repetition but, rather than seeming redundant, this repetition illuminates and deepens the narrative.

+ Chris agreed, noting that there are a great many characters in the book, but because you hear them speak, the reader learns to know each of them.

+ Because of the way the story resolves and how the key characters prevail in their quest to save Dodo, Steve felt that, on many levels, it was a revenge story. Margy countered with a quote from Kirkus, stating that rather than a revenge story, it is "a boisterous hymn to community mercy and karmic justice."

+ McBride is a master of stepping inside a character. Even though we readers may not entirely understand Nate, for example, Linda said "There was always something about Nate that you knew was quiet danger."

+ In interviews and speeches, McBride has said he does not want to write villains -- that he feels that everyone, no matter how they appear to others, is really just trying to do the best they can. You can watch the whole talk here, and it's worth it:

James McBride Speaks at the Free Library of Philadelphia

+ As part of both the Black and the Jewish communities, McBride is able to write with a deep level of knowledge about both, as well as to the other immigrant groups and individuals who are part of this story. He treats none of them as monoliths. As Lois pointed out, "The old Jews were impatient with the new Jews, the Poles were impatient with the Romanians, even in the Black community there was distance between the Chicken Hill people and the lowgods."

+ Jocey recommended that anyone who hasn't already done so should read McBride's Deacon King Kong, which she feels is a masterpiece. In reference to that book, the Los Angeles Times raved "Shouldn't we just get it over with and declare McBride this decade's Great American Novelist?"

Fun and Games and What's Ahead

+ Many thanks to Lois for baking TWO sweet potato pies. We all had a chance to test both pies. (Our apologies to those who couldn't get a taste through Zoom).

+ Our next book is Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. We need a volunteer to host.