Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
A Book Review by Pamela Sergey
During the 1970s, James McBride spent his college summers as a counselor at the Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, PA. For many years afterwards, McBride remained in contact with the camp’s director and many of his campers. It makes sense that McBride would write a book that has characters who are living with a disability. Published in 2023, Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is dedicated to Sy Friend, camp director from 1950-1979. In his acknowledgements, McBride credits Sy with teaching him long-lasting life lessons.
He writes: “Sy’s lessons of inclusivity, love, and acceptance - delivered not with condescending kindness but with deeds that showed the recipients the path to true equality - eventually morphed into this novel”. (pg 383)
The story takes place on Chicken Hill, a section of Pottstown, PA, outside of Philadelphia. According to the novel’s narrator, it is “a tiny area of ram- shackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lived.” (pg 11)
The book opens in 1972 during Hurricane Agnes when a body is found in a well, along with a mezuzah inscribed "Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World". From there, the story takes us back in time to the 1920s and 30s.
Danez Smith of the New York Times describes McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store as “a murder mystery inside a Great American Novel” (NYT 8/6/2023). But don’t think of it as a typical murder mystery. Known for his character development, McBride’s plot twists and turns as he introduces a myriad of characters with their own voice, good and bad, warm and cold, selfish or altruistic. In the end, the mystery plot is solved, but the reader comes away with so much more. I believe the mystery was the “hook”, the real message of the book is resilience, determination, optimism, and the ability of people and communities to overcome adversities.
One of the main characters in the story is Chona Ludlow, a Lithuanian Jew, who is disabled from polio. With her husband, Moche by her side, they run the general store for which the book is titled. Like the neighborhood at large, Chona struggles against hardship and social prejudices. But she does not allow the effects of polio to define her, she runs Heaven & Earth Grocery Store as a place of kindness and support, despite her physical difficulties.
Because the community works together, the store becomes the hub of the neighborhood – a stirring symbol of hope and kindness. Chona states “one’s tribe cannot be better than another tribe because they were all one tribe.” (pg 220). She is compassionate, determined and headstrong. Regardless of whether they are Black, Italian, or Jewish, Chona extends open credit to her customers, sometimes at the expense of her own financial stability. She also advocates for and shelters those in need, like the orphaned deaf young Black boy, Dodo.
After his mother dies, the State targets Dodo for institutionalization at nearby Pennhurst, an abusive mental institution. Dodo’s story becomes a symbol for the community’s fight for justice and equality as the community rallies to get Dodo out of Pennhurst. “Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society,” Moche thinks, “To her the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don't touch that. Rather she saw it as a place where every act of living was chance for a tikkun olam, to improve the world.” (pg 275)
On page 29, Chona asks “Charity of mind! Without charity of mind, what is life?”
How would you answer?
Pamela Sergey
Pamela has been a member of our volunteer team and a regular contributor to our work since 2021. Compassionate by nature, her passion for both art and history have resulted in her writing fascinating book reviews and articles of historical interest as well.
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