The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

400 pages

Published August 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts: 

Confession: this is another one of those books that I picked up without any notion of what it was about; I picked it up solely based on the author, an author I've been meaning to read for years, an author who's written three books I own but have never read. It's time I thought. And now I can't help but wonder if I might have done those other three books a disfavor. Not so much in ignoring them for so long (although that's certainly a disfavor), but in having set the bar so high for them with this one. 

The New York Times calls this book "a murder mystery locked inside a Great American novel" and a web. 

That murder mystery begins in the opening pages of the book, when that skeleton is found and then the mystery disappears until it is finally explained in the closing pages of the book. There is not much investigation, nor an inquiry in 1972 and readers will be forgiven for forgetting about that skeleton over the course of the book. They'll forget about it because McBride's about to weave that web, bringing in more and more story lines that, at first, seem to be leading nowhere. 

We quickly travel back in time to the 1920's and 1930's, to Chicken Hill, where African Americans and Jewish immigrants live in sometimes uneasy peace with each other and with the "real" Americans who live down the hill in Pottstown. McBride introduces to a wide range of characters in the neighborhood and a complicated water rights issue that will try your brain but stay with it, the payoff is well worth it. Not even the smallest detail is a throwaway in this book; everything points to something more. McBride takes his time building the novel; but it never felt too slow, so wrapped up was I in the people of Chicken Hill, the dynamics of the people who lived there, the music and politics of the time. There is humor here, tension, heartache, sadness, satisfaction, and joy and so many small and great lessons to be learned (although McBride is never preaching here). 

I picked this one up without knowing anything about it. Now I doubt I will ever forget it.