Lost Histories of Coexistence

James McBride's new novel tells a story of solidarity between Black and Jewish communities.

- Ayana Mathis

Near the end of James McBride's new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a character named Miggy makes a proclamation about what truly ails the folks living in the asylum where she works:

The illness is not in their minds, or in the color of their skin, or in the despair in their heart, or even the money they may or may not have. Their illness is honesty, for they live in a world of lies, ruled by those who surrendered all the good things that God gived them for money, living on stolen land.

Miggy is the oracle of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and a teller of truths that leap off the pages of the novel to describe America's abiding troubles. Before long, she's cutting a slice of the town's best sweet-potato pie into slivers to diagram an escape route for an inmate of the asylum. That's classic McBride: He doesn't shy away from bold statements about the national catastrophes of race and xenophobia, and he always gives us a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

The sugar is McBride's spitfire dialogue and murder-mystery-worthy plot machinations; his characters' big personalities and bigger storylines; his wisecracking, fast-talking humor; and prose so agile and exuberant that reading him is like being at a jazz jam session (which is no coincidence; McBride is an accomplished jazz musician). The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is set in the 1920s in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, an actual place that, as in the novel, was home to Jewish immigrants and to African Americans who'd migrated from the South. In the prologue, we learn that the last Jewish inhabitant, a mysterious figure named Malachi, has disappeared after cops showed up on his doorstep-and just before Hurricane Agnes sweeps in and destroys the whole area in 1972.