Book Study: "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store," James McBride

I was trying to think through the experience of reading James McBride’s “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” when suddenly I asked myself this question:  “Who is the hero?”  and the answer led me to write this little evaluation:
    Malachi the Dancer is the hero.  He opens and closes the novel, and he solves a mystery that haunts the head-scratching story. Malachi appears like the monolith from 2001 Space Odyssey and his appearance seems to move the story along. He pops up in 1972 as a suspect in a unsolved murder—a skeleton and some jewelry are found in a random grave on Chicken Hill, where he lives in the nearby dilapidated synagogue. The police are investigating and tell Malachi that he’s a suspect. Then, that night, historic Hurricane Agnes  wipes out the town; all the buildings are flattened  and the skeleton has been washed away.  Malachi is gone he next morning.  He reappears, in flashbacks, every ten years.  
    Moshe Ludlow could be next the hero.  He has the good sense to turn little into plenty.  In the 1920s, he takes a confusing, racist advertisement, changes it a little and stages a concert/dance that attracts a raucous crowd. That makes him a moneyed-man and a respected community leader.  He has the good sense to fall in love with the Grocery store’s daughter, propose to her, marry her, and live off her good sense and community love.  He’s able to “ride out” with a little patience many social problems that most people find unsolvable.  Probably his greatest asset is “hold tight and see what happens.”
    Moshe and Malachi are great friends, beginning in the 1920s.  Whenever Malachi is in Pottstown, he charges Moshe to act.
    Chona, Moshe’s wife, is the hero.  She has a special sense of being able to “read” people.  She studies; then she judges.  And just when she seems about to conquer, she dies.  Her death was the biggest, heaviest wrench thrown by McBride into the story.  Her magical powers of “being right” are offset by physical disabilities: she’s had polio but beautiful; she has a wild reputation but was totally correct about her hunches: don’t move out of Chicken Hill, offer credit to all her Black customers; encourage Moshe to turn the former funeral home into his Dance Hall and invite Black Audiences.  Also, add the first black entertainer Chick Webb to the mixed audience.  Webb is also crippled.
    At the weekly meeting of the Pottstown Association of Negro Men, Nate Timlin, arriving late, learns that a 14-year-old boy, has lost his mother, and has been seen riding a train around Pottstown county.  His mother nursed the boy back to life after the home stove blows up.  Dodo, the boy, loses his sight and his hearing.  Since then, he has recovered his sight.  
    Addie Timlin, Nate’s wife, upset with the men discussing Chona’s illness and the and the rumors about Dodo’s possible commitment to the Pennhurst State Hospital for the Insane and Feeble-minded, gets her husband to hide Dodo in the dank basement of the Dance Hall. When Chona hears about this, insists on transferring Dodo from the Dance Hall to the Grocery Store.  The Dance Hall basement is too dank and smelly for a child to survive.
    From here on the plot shifts into high gear.  Chona is sick; Dodo is free; Moshe is still in charge; Malachi has in and out again.  But Doctor Earl Roberts enters the story—and he is not a hero..  He went to school with Chona, was rejected by her because she had a bad “feeling” about him.  He went to college, graduated with a medical degree, and returned to Pottstown to practice medicine.  The Whites loved him; the Blacks raged against him; the Jews left him alone—all the Jews except for Chona.  Chone knew he marched in the KKK parade each year, because she recognized his limp. Doc, too, was a cripple--and a very bad man.
    Trying to find Dodo, Doc went to the store, confronted the sick Chona and got in a heated fight which caused Chona to stroke out.  Instead of trying to save her life, Doc tries to rape Chona—until Dodo appears from behind a counter and attacks Doc—causing him to run out of the store.  While helping Chona, Doc returns with the police, and they chase down the child.  Trying to escape the police Dodo runs to the roof and is thrown off the roof by the police. Doc manages to convince the authorities and most of Chicken Hill that Chona was not assaulted.  He was. 
    In bad shape with broken bones from the fall, Dodo wakes up at the sanitarium locked in a crib next to a pale, white, deformed boy named Monkey Pants, and they both are heroes—because they’re stuck in the worst ward at a dirty hospital with a guard who is one of the biggest perverts imaginable, named Son of God.

Reviews, Analysis, Dialectic Journal, images

67 pages pages;20,735 words; images