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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest book from author James McBride is being called the next great American novel and it's easy to see why. McBride brings his trademark sense of humor and gift with characters to a true melting pot community in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. The novel is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1920s and '30s. They're in a neighborhood called Chicken Hill, Black residents, Jewish Americans, and new European immigrants live side by side in relative harmony even if friendships tend to stay mostly segregated. Oh, and the Klan is around too.

The Jewish and Black Communities band together in order to protect a young Black boy named Dodo. Dodo lost his hearing in a kitchen accident, a stove blew up. His mother died and he's left in the care of his uncle Nate and aunt Addie. When Nate hears the state wants to come take Dodo away and send him to a horrible institution for the disabled, he turns to his Jewish boss Moshe for help. Moshe owns a theater and a grocery store in town and Nate hopes Dodo can hide in the theater for a while, but Moshe's wife Chona, who runs their grocery store insists that Dodo live with them.

Chona has a limb from a childhood bout with polio and her health is not good. She's never been able to have children herself so Dodo becomes a beloved presence in her life until a local doctor comes looking for the boy and everything changes. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store has been called charming, smart, heart-blustering, and heart-healing by the New York Times. The Washington Post says, "It's genius." The novel is a finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize and was our September Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. James McBride joined us for a live sold-out event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library last week. I began by asking James how the afterword in his book inspired this novel.

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Let's start at the end of the book and the afterward. You write this book began as an ode to Sy Friend, the retired director of the Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, Pennsylvania. You worked there a few summers at that camp. As we learned in Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a camp like this was established and named Camp Chona for one of our heroines in the novel. How did Sy in your work and your experience of the camp help you write this novel?

James McBride: Well, the first thing you learn when you work at a camp for handicapped kids is that you don't really understand what the word normal means anymore because handicapped or disabled are the terms that really-- they don't apply to most people. They didn't apply to most of those kids. In a straight way, they did. Sy ran the camp. He was a Jewish guy. He was just so smart, and he was so good about equality. He believed in equality.

I met him through-- I applied for the job as a college kid. I ended up seeing a guy named Bill Saltzman who was an old Jewish guy. I applied for the job as a dishwasher and after about 10 minutes, Bill Saltzman said, "You're too smart to be a dishwasher." He picked up the phone, and he said, "Sy, Sy, I have a kid who’s too smart to be a dishwasher. Make him a counselor," and he hung up. I went to see Sy, and I'd never met anybody like him. He was so smart. He's still alive. He's 89.

He was just so smart and he just let the kids be human. He demanded that if you didn't let them be human, you didn't last at the camp very long. The lessons of humanity and equality that he taught me back in the '70s, stay with me for the rest of my life and I always wanted to put it in a book in some kind of form or fashion.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Some of your most appealing characters have disabilities. It's Chona whose leg was compromised, Dodo who was made deaf by a stove exploding, and lands in this terrifying hospital. His hospital friend and confidant Monkey Pants, who was profoundly compromised but a master communicator as we learn. What did you want to explore about the treatment and the expectation of people with disabilities or handicaps?

James McBride: Well, first of all, people with disabilities, they share the same thing-- They're like Black people in the sense that everyone gets to make a speech about you but you [unintelligible 00:04:37] wrenching. What I wanted to show was that a person who's disabled or differently abled can certainly do it better than I did. What I tried to show was that their sense of communication, their sense of love is so powerful that even the smallest bit of communication that Monkey Pants managed to make happen, held within this tiny granular bit of information, the light of the world. That's why people who are so-called disabled are special because they like music.

Music is God's way of speaking. There's nothing like music which you'll hear shortly. A person who's disabled when they say it's a beautiful day, it means that something really special is happening because the ability to just walk down the street for you and I, we're complaining because the bus left us but for people who are disabled or differently abled, they have spent their lives witnessing our silliness and pettiness. They watch us. They're witnesses and when they speak, it means something.

Alison Stewart: Pottstown, Pennsylvania is a real place. Chicken Hill, a real neighborhood. If you google it, you'll find out that Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates is from Pottstown, fun of fact. It's described this way by Historical Society Association. By 1898, more than 500 people, mostly recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were employed at the Setauket Rubber Company. By 1930, the community was a cohesive and isolated polyglot village, both ethnically and culturally. The population of the area included Russians, Polish, Lithuanians, Romanians, Irish, Italians, Native Americans, and African Americans. When did you first learn about this community?

James McBride: Well, I was just kicking around up there at the Pottstown Historical Society and somebody mentioned Chicken Hill. I went up into Chicken Hill, you could see it right from the window of the Historical Society. It's a bunch of houses that are clustered on hillsides. I went up there and started talking to people. That's how I found out about it. What I learned very quickly is that small-town America was not like the Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show. [whistling]

[laughter]

James McBride: That's the fiction that has been used ironically to turn us against each other now politically. The complexity of American life was much different and that's really what I was looking for when I went up into Chicken Hill.

Alison Stewart: Why were you at the Pottstown Historical Society?

[laughter]

James McBride: Well, that's where I always go when I'm--

[laughter]

When I'm researching a book I always go to a place and the first place I usually go is the library-- first place that I go is the library and the second place I go is the Historical Society. Historical Society is a weird-- With all due respect to the Pottstown Historical Society, great people, dominus ominous, [unintelligible 00:07:38]

[laughter]

James McBride: The Historical Societies usually have a lot of the white history and then from there, you can figure out the rest that you need to find out. They're great places of research for me and I'm always happy to go to Historical-- Sometimes you have to work through the weirdness of some of the people there. I remember Eastern Maryland was not a nice Historical Society.

[laughter]

I got through that too. You do the job.

Alison Stewart: The novel has so many characters like your novels do. You got Nate is strong yet tortured. Addie a reliable and loyal. Paper, witty, observant. Doug, racist and petulant. Big Soap's mom, fierce and fierce [chuckles], and they all intersect. My question is how you populate your novels? Do you start with one character and build a world around that character or does the story dictate who comes next?

James McBride: Well, every novel was different. This novel was different in the sense that, this really started out as a book about camp because of Sy Friend and my experience at the Variety Club Camp in Philadelphia. Then I discarded all that because the only chapter that was good was the chapter that talked about the person who donated the land for the camp, that was Moshe. Once I got Moshe involved and Chona was folding into his life, then the rest of the plot started to roll out. You have the Joseph Campbell mode of operation, normal world, conflict strikes the normal world. The subsequent explosion as story.

Alison Stewart: Your process for naming characters, you've got Big Soap, Paper, Fatty. How do you name your characters?

James McBride: Well, I just think of my siblings because I wouldn't give a kidney to none of my siblings. I can tell you that right now.

[laughter]

They'll not get a kidney from me. [laughs] No. That's just in the air. It's just in the air. I draw a big circle and I write the names of the characters in the circle and as the plot evolves very quickly it becomes clear that this name is not going to work, this character is not-- I just wipe it out and I put a new name and after a while, they just start to roll out. Names are important because characters are important. I put these characters through many different tests in my head before I actually set their names on the magic circle.

Alison Stewart: What are you testing for?

James McBride: I'm testing for resolve and humor mostly. They have to be funny and they have to be decent people. They have to be people that I really want to spend time with because I spend a lot of time with them. They're the kinds of people I would like to know, that I would like to love, that I would like to go have a cup of coffee with.

Alison Stewart: I love the way you describe clothing in the book. This is an example. "Shad was a mild, neatly attired Negro who unlike the other Negroes on the Hill avoided coveralls and farmer's clothing preferring a gentleman's jacket, a tattered Homburg, as hat and leather shoes no matter what the job."

James McBride: Well, I've known people like that. There are some people who just-- Nowadays the way people dress is not the same as it was back in the day. Back in the day when people dressed nice.

[laughter]

For African Americans, you always wanted to put your best foot forward. Even when I was in college the Black kids always dressed nice and the white kids in general with t-shirts and jeans and all that stuff. That was just a cultural thing because you were supposed to look nice. Not that I looked very good, but.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The story we get, not only the perspective of how the Black folks are thinking about the Jewish folks and Jewish folks are thinking about the Black folks, but also within the groups how the Lithuanians are thinking about the Germans and vice versa, low country Black folks are thinking about hoity-toity NAACP people. What did you want to examine about the relationship first between the Black and the Jewish community in this particular group?

James McBride: Well when you say the word community, it really means nothing if you love someone from that community. If you say you love someone who's Jewish, you're not loving the Jewish community, you're just loving that person. I grew up and I was raised by a Jewish woman who lived in Black America. When she walked down the street, it wasn't like the Jewish community is raising African-American children. What should we do? It wasn't so. It's all about people. It's real simple. It's really all about people. The differences within communities is interesting as a novelist and as a writer to examine. If you can find two Jews who agree on anything, I'll give you $100 right now.

[laughter]

African Americans have the same issues and we just had this conversation recently about the light skin, the dark skin, the [unintelligible 00:12:51]. I don't know how to participate in these kinds of conversations because they're stupid. It's really just about people. While these differences existed in these communities, they're linchpins that allow me to inject comedy, and inject humanity because most of these differences don't mean anything. Going back to the disabled, now a so-called disabled person, they're not going to get too much into this. Now they do, they do, but they don't let too much of our poison infect their otherwise more pure world.

Alison Stewart: I loved the Yiddish in the book. Irv turned to Mr. Hudson again, and at this time, the beast known as the Skrupskalus was loose. "Listen, Pischer, if you mention that bullfrog one more time, I'll hang a zitz on your head. Get a hold of yourself," Hudson snapped. We asked people in our book club what their favorite Yiddish word was, and we got oy, fakakta, chutzpah shvitz. Do you have a favorite Yiddish word?

James McBride: No, I better not. I'm not even going to venture into that.

[laughter]

My mother spoke Yiddish. My sisters told me when we were younger, she would take us down to Delancey Street, the old Delancey Street, and she would talk to the merchants in Yiddish. They would go like, boing.

[laughter]

No, I don't have a favorite Yiddish. I love the sound of Yiddish, and I love this aspect of Jewish culture that's reflected in Mickey Katz and his music. I can recall David Preston, my good friend, his father was a Holocaust survivor. He played the mandolin. He was a wonderful mandolin player. We were playing one time and I said to him, "Why are we playing everything in minor keys?" He said, "Jewish life is in minor keys." I never forgot that. No, I don't have a favorite Yiddish word. No.

Alison Stewart: There's so much of it in the book.

James McBride: Well, when the characters start to speak you've got to get into that character's head. It's your responsibility. Now the Skupskeles twins, for example, these weren't the kinds of-- they weren't like the Jewish chemistry student at Cardoza High School who was who carried around a wagon full of sand so he could kick sand in his face. These were tough guys. Yiddish for them was a five-fisted language that they would use before they knocked your block off. You have to reflect.

In that regard, you have to use the power of the language in that situation to let the reader know that the Skrupskeles twins scared the bejesus out of everyone because they were hard people. A lot of these immigrants who came, I'm sure there are four or five Jews in the audience, of the three Jews here would understand how hard life was for that particular group of Jews who made their way to America. Some of them were hard people because they lived a hard life.

You've heard that from Black people from the South. They'd say, "I'm a hard woman because I've lived a hard life." Beneath the hardness, beneath the brutal exterior was just the norm of depth of philanthropy and kindness. That's what you reach for as a novelist if you're smart. You reach for that because that's what drives-- Everything that is driven by love doesn't need a lot of water. The water will just flow. When something's driven by hate, it's a diesel, and you've got to diesel it up. You've got to fuel it all. That's why Orange Head is having such a hard time. He's got to constantly create crap.

When something's powered by love, it just flows. It just flows. You work through that exterior. The Skrupskeles twins, the Skrupskeles brothers, they were twins, they loved Chona, or Hannah if you're Jewish. They loved her because she broke the rules. She did everything she wasn't supposed to do. They understood her. They knew her foot. They knew what her feet were like. They knew how difficult her life was. This guy's coming in here talking about a frog in a mick, big deal. He'll hang one on his head. There it was.

Alison Stewart: We'll have more of my conversation with James McBride and some audience questions from our Get Lit event after a quick break. Stay with us.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with James McBride, author of our September Get Lit with All Of It book club selection, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. Our September event was sold out and it was so nice to see a packed house full of eager readers. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 8,370 of you were able to check out an e-copy and read along with us. As always, our audience members came with some great questions. You'll hear some of those in a minute, but first, here's more of my conversation with James McBride.

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Alison Stewart: In an interview with the Washington Post, you mentioned that Chona was based in part on your grandmother.

James McBride: Well, inspired by my grandmother because my grandmother ran a store in Suffolk, Virginia in the '30s. She had polio. Her left hand was disabled. Her husband didn't love her. My uncle, who was her only son, ran away and was killed in World War II. My mother ran away and married my father. She wasn't loved by her husband. I put her on the page and I made her loved. Once she got on the page, she became Chona. I call her Chona. The Jewish people say, Hannah, whatever you want to call her. She became her own person. Then she began to lift and move in ways that were particular to her. Yes, it was inspired by my grandmother.

Alison Stewart: There's a story in the book where Chona and Bernice, who's Black, they're sewing dresses together for school, but the teacher rips up Bernice's dress for using the wrong stitching, even though she and Chona used the same stitching. That ends the friendship. Why did that incident take Bernice's joy? She really seemed joyless after that.

James McBride: Well, you can write a 300-page book or you can write a 500-page book. If I'd have written a 500-page book, I'd have backed into Bernice's story and told what led to that moment. Bernice was two years older than Chona. She was going to a school that was integrated, but not really so. Her father had died. Her brother going to jail, Brother Fatty. Fatty was on his way to jail. The mother was in complete distress, the family never had money and the only family one of the few families that was kind to them was Chona and her father and mother. There was a lot of shame because Bernice, she didn't like handouts. Bernice was physically a gorgeous girl or woman, or young woman, teenager. There were problems that resulted in that as well.

There was no space to do that. There was just space to show that this was what broke the camel's back and Chona happened to be there. Sometimes when you love a person a lot, you take your rage out on them. You take your anger out on the one that loves you the most. Chona loved Bernice. These two girls loved each other and she loved Bernice the most.

Bernice, like some people do, took out her rage on Chona and felt hurt and embarrassed about it ever since. Then, of course, subsequently, Bernice had all these stupid boyfriends and all these kids, and her problems just compounded upon themselves.

Alison Stewart: Our villain is our rotten, racist, lying abuser town doctor. Did I leave anything out?

[laughter]

James McBride: I can't think of anything. No.

Alison Stewart: A little stupid maybe. He's useful in one way because he brings everybody together in a way that people can agree that he's awful. What do you have to keep in mind when you're writing a villain and this particular villain?

James McBride: Well, you try to humanize him as much as you can. Doc Roberts, he had issues as well. He was a victim of the industrialization of the town. The town changed. The whole mythology of white American sack, the WASP people coming over here and the blah, blah, blah, making friends with the Indians and then killing them after Thanksgiving, all that stuff. Doc is a victim of that because He believed it in his heart. It really meant something.

Even though he was a sick person, your responsibility to the reader is to show why this person believes he's doing good. He thought that he was doing good by trying to romance this Jewish. He thought that he was actually trying to bring her up to his level, not knowing that he had no level to bring her to. It's important to humanize everyone and to show not good sides, but human sides of people so you can see how the devil does his work if the devil is a man.

Alison Stewart: How he gets to where he is.

James McBride: When I mean devil gets around, I don't mean Doc Robert. I mean when people do awful things, they have a rationale for it, and they absolve themselves of their evil some kind of way. What would Jesus do? That's one of my favorite. Who cares what Jesus-- What would you do? I'm not interested in what Jesus would do. That's just a bunch of bull crap. This is how someone absolves themselves, the responsibility of caring about their fellow human being. They say, "Well, what would Jesus do?" "I'm going to pray for you," or some other nonsense.

You saw how Doc can absolve himself with the responsibility of being a full human being by showing how he tried to help this poor, disabled Jewish girl, and she turned him away, and now he got all testosterone about it. Later on, you realize that he's not such a nice guy after all because she's not the first. That's how some of these guys operate as well. I tried to humanize the man as much as I could without saying he's just a bad guy because that's not really good writing.

Alison Stewart: A few critics have called this a great American novel. What do you think is American about this story?

James McBride: I don't read reviews. Please review my book next time, though. Thank you. Grateful. It's just the label. What's American? American is this room. American is the people from Venezuela who are walking around in the city right now looking for a home. America's a mayor that says, "We got room for you. We're proud. Welcome to New York." That's what's American.

I don't like this whole business of saying that this country is not big enough for the rest of the people who come here. This room is full of immigrants. I've had it with that kind of chitchat. This book indicates that I've had it with that kind of chitchat because it's chitchat and it's small and we're bigger than that. I don't want to hear anybody saying, we don't have the space. We'll make the space. That's what Americans do. If it's a great American novel in that regard, I'm proud of that. If America means we don't want you because we can't, then I don't want to have nothing to do with that because it's not true. I don't know how I got into that.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Was good. Why don't we get some microphones for questions in the audience? If you've got a question, why don't you raise your hand and we'll start running mics shortly. Anybody.

Speaker 3: My question has to do with Doc's demise and the somewhat accidental nature of it, but I'm curious about how you constructed that, because it plays into the larger mechanics of politics in the town and who has the right to water and all of the other access to resources. I'm just curious about how you made that part of the story, and what were you thinking? Were you thinking about Doc? Were you thinking about this as another aspect of community? I'm just curious about that.

James McBride: That's a very good question. I don't remember. I have become painfully aware of the lack of resources and the misuse of water and the power of water in our world now. I was also mindful that I needed a mechanism-- When you get laid into a book, when you read like Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, the last three chapters of Moby-Dick are the most exciting chapters of any book I've ever read or To Kill a Mockingbird, when you get to the back end of it and there's the party and the whole business of the Halloween affair and so forth. I needed a mechanism to get us home, and I needed a way to deal with Doc.

Honestly, that just came from the sky. I mean, when I wrote Deacon King Kong, I had this whole business in that book about ants. In that book, there's a whole soliloquy about ants. Then the ants were supposed to eat the drug dealer in that book, but it didn't work out. I just left it alone and the ants just lived. In this case, it was just the water business somehow became important. It was a way of tying Shad Davis who built the Shul and Fatty and everyone else, and to deal with Doc. That's about as close as I come to answering your question

Alison Stewart: In the book, this moment of hope or this idea of hope is these two communities come together to do what's right to save this boy. That's very hopeful.

James McBride: Well, look, there are 1000s and 1000s of retired teachers in this city who have done what's right. If we're going to stop a basketball game or a football game and salute someone from the military, why not put a teacher next to that person? Really? Or a librarian. We have the wrong priorities here. What teachers don't get, what my guidance counselor Dr. Burton Silverman did get, because he was my guidance counselor when I was at Cardozo High School, is someone coming back saying, "Thank you so much. Thank you for what you did for me."

That's really what this book is. This book is for the teachers and librarians and people like the people in the audience who are listening, and those here who have given the best of themselves. There was a guy named Milton Sherman, who was a tax accountant here in New York. He used to handle all broke musicians, artists, all this stuff. His business is run by a Black woman who we hired. I had dinner with her and her Jewish best friend today. This is how the world spins. Now if as a writer, my job is to find these stories and make those stories go. That's why I get out of bed in the morning.

Alison Stewart: I think we have time for one or two more questions.

Speaker 4: Can you talk a little bit about the mysticism surrounding Malachi and the challah that was healing Hanah and how that came into this story? I know this is a shorter book, but I'm thinking if it were 500 pages long, what would've happened to him?

James McBride: Well, Malachi was a crucial character because he represents the old world and the Jews from the old world who came to America and took a look at this and said, "I don't like this." In fact, I dropped Martin Luther King's words into Malachi's mouth when Malachi says, "We are integrating into a burning house." I've been interested and curious about the Hasidic Jewish community here in New York. Now, I'm not qualified to talk about it. I have a couple of cousins who are Hasidic Jews and so forth.

There is a magic to certain parts of the very, very orthodox Jewish world. There's a folklore business, there's a spiritual mysticism to it. It's really, really free, and it's just really interesting. It just has a certain pop to it. I wanted to represent it a little bit in this character, just enough like a journalist to pretend like I knew what I was talking about, [laughter] but not enough to be a pretender because I wanted people to see the free-flowing aspect of Jewish life.

Now, I wasn't raised as a Jew, but that doesn't mean I can't see what's in front of me as an artist. That's why Malachi was so important. I love him. The fact is he survived after all of it, which made him very, very crucial. I hope you don't miss that point. The cops wanted to frame them up for this murder. They came, the hurricane came, wiped everything out. Malachi got off clean and the Black folks are really happy about it because they know what really happened. That was his purpose.

Alison Stewart: Music--

James McBride: Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Alison Stewart: No, please.

James McBride: You're just having these characters serve a certain purpose. You don't want to muscle the story along, you just want to frame it and let them create the alleyway that allows the story to move.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with James McBride from our Get Lit with All Of It book club event. His novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was our September selection.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Up next, we hear a special performance from Grammy-nominated jazz singer Carla Cook, who is a friend of Mr. McBride's. Stay with us.

[music]

[00:31:57] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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