The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
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James McBride on The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Four summers that took forty years to get onto the pageThe book’s emotional engine is a man McBride met as a college freshman in Philadelphia, when a newspaper ad for a dishwasher job led him to a sleepaway camp for disabled children run by a director named Sy Friend. McBride spent four summers there. He spent the next several decades failing to turn what he learned into fiction.
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.
When the camp scenes finally made it onto the page, they came out flat. One chapter kept working, and it had nothing to do with camp directly. Following that single working chapter forced McBride to abandon the project he thought he was writing and discover the actual novel underneath it.
This really started out as a book about camp... 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.
Chona, the Jewish woman at the center of the novel, carried a second origin alongside the camp story. McBride’s grandmother was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who died in 1942, before he was born. She had a hard marriage and worked in a store. Fiction let him rewrite what history had denied her.
I wanted my grandmother to be — to have a wonderful life. I wanted her to be loved. So I wrote a book in which she was loved, and I made her loved... Fiction is magical that way. Fiction allows your dreams to come true.
Beyond the personal, McBride saw the book filling a gap in collective memory. The friendship and friction between Black and Jewish communities in Depression-era Pennsylvania was a history he felt had gone largely unexamined, and he believed recovering it had something practical to offer.
I don’t think people really know that much about Jewish life in America, you know, in the ‘30s and ‘40s... learning how these two groups, Blacks and Jews, got together and worked to live together and got along has something to show us about how to live today.
How he wrote it
A paper map, a state hospital, and the courage to let the story inMcBride began researching the book around 2008, while still finishing his National Book Award-winning novel ‘The Good Lord Bird.’ His most sustained early stop was Norristown State Hospital, the institution that figures in the novel’s most harrowing plot line, and he stayed long enough to move past administrative access into something closer to genuine immersion.
Years of research. I started researching this, but probably in 2008... I went to Norristown State Hospital. I spent several months in and out of that place... the research took years because 90% of what you come up with when you research something, you don’t use.
The novel’s setting, the Black and Jewish neighborhood called Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, turned up not through archival planning but through a wrong turn. McBride was driving across the state with a paper map, initially aimed at Pottsville, when he noticed a different town name and pulled off.
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.
Before a character earns a place in the novel, McBride runs a private audition. He draws a large circle on paper, fills it with names, and maps the connections between them. But what drives that selection process is less analytical than it sounds.
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.
Once the characters pass that test and the architecture of connections is drawn, McBride describes the actual act of drafting as a release of control. The method he explained to Mitzi Rapkin on the Literary Hub ‘First Draft’ podcast is the opposite of an outline: it is a practice of deliberate surrender.
You’re really going on faith. You don’t really know what’s going to happen... The trick is to not fall in love with your words, but to fall in love with your ideas, and then let your ideas go. Let them go, so that story can enter the room.
On what the book is wrestling with
Equality as the ground beneath the storyThe novel follows a large cast of Black and Jewish residents in a 1930s Pennsylvania neighborhood, and McBride is careful to frame that material as drama rather than argument. His concern is that the book do what fiction does, not what a history lesson does.
It’s not a lecture book, it’s not a textbook. It’s a novel and characters do things and so forth, but at bottom, that’s what the book is about. The desire for people to live in a community where equality exists.
At the center of the novel’s community are Dodo, a Black deaf boy, and the people who protect him from institutionalization. McBride’s sense of what disabled people see and know was shaped directly by the camp summers of his youth, and it runs through how he writes every character with a disability in the book.
They have spent their lives witnessing our silliness and pettiness. They watch us. They’re witnesses and when they speak, it means something.
McBride spent years navigating race as subject matter across his earlier books, including the memoir ‘The Color of Water’ and ‘The Good Lord Bird.’ His advice to himself, repeated here about the fiction, amounts to a discipline he has practiced long enough that it reads as conviction rather than technique.
If you’re a writer and you’re writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are. Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries — to make your story go.
When Julian Lucas of the New Yorker Radio Hour pressed McBride on what animates the relationships in the novel, he reached for an image that names the book’s emotional logic without making a thesis of it.
Hate is like diesel and it just gobbles up fuel, but love and kindness, it’s like they just float like clouds. They just go out and it’s easy.
That image is not sentiment for McBride. It is a practical account of how the community in the novel survives what the state and the era try to do to it.
What he wants us to sit with
America as it was, and a quiet argument for what it could beAsked at CBS Mornings to name the single thing he hoped readers would carry away, McBride gave an answer that compressed the whole project into one sentence. The CBS segment was recorded shortly after the book’s August 2023 publication, when the novel was already drawing attention for its portrait of unlikely solidarity.
I hope people take away equality. That we’re all equal, and that our journey’s the same. And that we’re much more alike than we are different. [paraphrased from audio]
For McBride, the book’s argument is not delivered through its themes but earned through its plot. The novel opens with a skeleton unearthed at the bottom of a well in a Pennsylvania town, then unfolds backward through the lives of the people who lived there. That structure lets the community speak for itself before any reader can categorize it.
It’s just about a little town in Pennsylvania where this Jewish woman takes in this Black deaf boy, and the waves of activity that follow show us what America was and should be.