The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

I was thrilled to finally get to read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (2023) by James McBride, as I’ve loved his writing since reading his memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother and the brilliant pre-civil war historical fiction The Good Lord Bird.

In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, McBride weaves together a tale of a group of Jewish and Black residents in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and their interactions with the more well-off white residents of the area, mostly during the Great Depression.

He follows Chona, who is disabled because of polio as a child, but runs the titular grocery, and her husband, Moshe, who has integrated the local dance hall, featuring touring klezmer bands and Black bands as well. Their neighbors are Nate, who helps Moshe with the dance hall, and Addie, who assists Chona in the store. Nate and Addie, who are Black, are taking care of their nephew, Dodo, who is deaf and cannot speak, because his mother has died. Chona, who could not have children of her own, agrees to hide Dodo when the local officials think he would be better off in a home for the mentally disabled, Pennhurst, which is no more than a prison, than with Nate and Addie.

The local doctor is a KKK member and had had a crush on Chona when they were in high school. When he comes to the store and assaults Chona, Dodo saves her but is caught in the process, while Chona falls, and becomes ill with seizures, while Addie takes care of her. There is a large cast of characters in both the Black and Jewish community, and all of them come together to make sure Dodo does not get harmed. It’s intricate and beautifully written and the epilogue is affecting and inspiring.

It was completely weight neutral, and was inclusive of differently-abled characters, with Chona having dealt with polio, and Dodo being deaf.

Chona . . . did not experience the world as most people did. She saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.