The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Title: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Author: James McBride 

(American-African-Jewish, 1957- )
Originally published: 2023

Page count: 327

Dates read: 4/18/24-4/28/24

2024 book goal progress: 6 out of 24

Read my other book reviews for my 2024 goals HERE.




Description on back of book:

In 1972, when workers 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.

First sentence:
"There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went to."

Favorite quotes:
"She spent hours reading about socialists and unions and progressives and politics and corporations, fighting about a meaningless flag that said 'I'm proud to be American,' when it should have said, 'I'm happy to be alive,' and what the difference was, and how one's tribe cannot be better than another tribe because they were all one tribe."

"American history is not meant to be pretty. It is plain. It is simple. It is strong and truthful. Full of blood. And guts. And war."

"Now there's man's understanding and there's women's understanding. There is white folks' understanding and Negroes' understanding. And then there is just plain wisdom. Every child that breathes their first on this earth will drive their fist through the air and strike nothing. But all children are born with will."

CAWPILE Rating: Overall - 5.7/10 - ⭐⭐⭐/5
Characters      - 6
Atmosphere   - 6
Writing Style - 6
Plot                - 6
Intrigue          - 6
Logic             - 5
Enjoyment     - 5
What is a CAWPILE Rating?

Review:

It's an OK story that deals with racism (immigration, Africans, African-Americans, Italians, Irish, Polish, Greek, etc.), ableism (deaf, cerebral palsy, institutionalism, etc.), sexism (strong female characters not considered the norm), religious discrimination (mostly anti-semantic, but others, too), and classism (very big money differences between communities). It was a bit more complicated and convoluted than needed. It ended on a positive note... but justice was never really made. It's not a bad story, but... it wasn't all that good either.

Now I'm off to read another book... but since a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let James McBride have the last words:

"The odd group of well-wishers slowly... tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly... moving toward a common destiny, all of them into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. 

The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog... 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, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought."