What I wish Trader Joe's was called

Or, my latest great novel recommendation

Ok, I could vent my spleen every week about the news–and I know you could too. But let’s return to the wonderful world of fiction, where idiots sometimes get their due, and the good folks sometimes win. Let’s go to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.

THEGS is a big juicy book that takes its time to unfurl and honestly sometimes seems downright unconcerned to do so, more interested in just introducing you to the various denizens of Chicken Hill. Community is the name of the game in McBride’s novel, and in this downtrodden neighborhood where everyone is struggling to survive in a country openly intolerant to people like them: Black, Jewish, or recently arrived from foreign shores. Chicken Hill is the poor neighborhood of Pottstown, PA, where the Klan proudly march down main street. The heroine of the story is Chona Ludlow, who runs the neighborhood market, the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. Even though most of the Jews are upgrading to the nicer and whiter neighborhoods of Pottstown, Chona insists she and her husband stay put. Chicken Hill is their home, and the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is her life. 

With her clarity of conscience, Chona forms the iron spine of this story even though her body is weak and disabled from a bout with Polio as a child. What I like best about her is that she can’t be bothered with social mores or rules. She’s this tiny, not-wealthy, not-powerful grocer with a limp who will always take a risk if it’s the right thing to do. She outs a pillar of the community as being a Klansman. She lets her neighbors shop on credit, even though she knows they’ll never be able to pay their bill. And when a young boy who was made deaf by an explosion needs a place to safely hide from the authorities, she doesn’t hesitate to volunteer.

I understand if all of this is sounding a little earnest and too wholesome, but urge you to override that apprehension and read it anyway. For one thing, it isn’t corny, at all. It’s complicated and vivid, funny and violent, romantic and grimly honest. 

Chicken Hill is a singular place, where people who are very different live side-by-side in gritty harmony. The people on Chicken Hill have no money and no power. So to get by, they work together. Everyone has to hustle and scrape, borrow and lend. They have to snuggle up with strange bedfellows, tolerate neighbors, bury hatchets, and respect and accept one another. They have no choice, and this is their salvation. 

I love the different characters–Chona, Fatty, Paper (named because she was as informative as the newspaper), the Lowgods, Malechai and on and on. Of course, so much of what makes this novel unforgettable is McBride’s incredible writing. It’s nothing showy–not like Paul Murray’s pyrotechnics in The Bee Sting—it’s just clear and powerful. Every nearly stand-alone chapter paints these scenes that feel like wondrous mashups of Ernie Barnes and Marc Chagall paintings. 

McBride keeps us thoroughly immersed in 1930s Pennsylvania, save one moment when he pulls focus and shows his hand.   

“They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or Erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—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 struggle and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.” 

Maybe that line resonated so deeply with me because I read it the same week I was one of those cheering celebrants dazzled by the Super Bowl. Even so, I do worry that we’ve been lulled by the comforts of sectarian bubbles. There are so many real struggles we should be working together to solve—homelessness, environmental catastrophe, the migrant crisis—and instead we’re caught up in political bullshit. The only struggle we Americans truly share seems to be with our capacity for distraction and inattention, not with the real problems we should be facing.

Community is anathema in our culture today–unless of course your community is entirely populated by people who think, dress, and eat just like you, and–more importantly–vote just like you. The people with all the power love this polarization. While we engage in dumb pissing matches on social media about fringe issues, greedy media corporations profit from the polarization, and selfish and malignant white men are dismantling our democracy. Where’s our Chicken Hill? 

“The Dream” by Marc Chagall

“Life after Sundown” by Ernie Barnes

Whoa. This AI’s take on a mashup of Ernie Barnes and Marc Chagall—not at all what I was thinking when I described McBride’s book. Silly AI. Avert your eyes, stick to the two works of art preceding this weirdness.