Jews and coloreds are not the minorities on Chicken Hill. They comprise the whole of a community which looks down on the whites living below them in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. This reversal of the usual town plan subtly lets the reader know right from the beginning where James McBride is going with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.
Chicken Hill residents may have no money; they may live in shacks with tin roofs on muddy roads with open sewers; they may be the rejects of society. But they are beautiful; they are strong and resourceful; they are loved. Their skills are born of necessity – they know how to launder, fix the plumbing, and mix the cement. McBride has created a vivid picture of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and blacks from the deep South who have built a web of connection to help them negotiate the scornful and belittling white world.
The stars of the show are Moshe, a theater owner who brings jazz to the hill; his beloved wife Chona who follows the Jewish tradition of “tikkun olam,” (repair the world), her best friends Bernice and Addie (blacks), and Addie’s husband Nate, who becomes the hero.
On the other side is Doc Roberts who loves to march in his white robe and pointed hood but is still besotted with the Jewess who ignored him in high school. There is Gus Plitzka whose machinations with the city water supply both in town and on Chicken Hill make up one of the two main story lines.
Young Dodo, deaf after an accident at home, is raised by his aunt Addie and Nate with the help of the childless Chona who loves him. When the state wants to take him away and put him in a “school,” the community of Chicken Hill closes ranks. Working together by using extended family contacts and calling in favors, they hatch a risky plan to save him.
While the two story lines are fine, they exist only to give McBride a platform for his exploration of race relations in small town USA in the 30s. The main strength of the novel is in its richly detailed characters and the beauty of their descriptions:
Nate peered into his wife’s searching…brown eyes, then down at her hand…the long fingers that wiped the sweat off his face after work, that knitted his pants and stroked his ear and cared for him in ways that he’d never been cared for as a child. And the rage that overcame him eased.
Anita De Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez is an unusual novel. The author herself describes it as weird (a timely word) but in a good way. Narrated by two young Latina artists, thirteen years apart, it is set in the East Coast art scene. The book is edgy and the beginning is told in the @!* language of twenty somethings.
Rachel, her background Puerto Rican, is an ambitious art student at Brown, working to make a place for herself in the very white male art world. She has never heard of Anita de Monte, the Cuban artist whose work is already forgotten, only thirteen years after she died. But Anita, although dead, is not finished.
The professional lives of the two women echo each other as they deal with the indifference to voices that are female and Latin, and fight against curbing their artistic visions to gain approval. Their relationships with the men they love have similar conflicts. Both want to support their successful white partners. Each has to deal with that partner’s “help.” Maybe she should wear her hair in a neat, more elegant bun; maybe she should wear the dress he has chosen.
Fiery Anita who has died but cannot give up her anger, discovers she can still control some things on earth. For those she hates, she can turn into a bat that can terrorize and bite. For those she loves, she becomes a wind, flipping a page to a significant picture.
When Rachel eventually discovers Anita’s work buried in storage, it is an epiphany to learn that she is not the first; there have been other talented Latina artists before her. Anita is happy to be resurrected; Rachel is happy to have found her; they will help each other.
There’s a word for that? Yes, those marks that take the place of cursing in written language, @!&*, are called grawlix. It’s a new word, first documented in the 1960s.
What was used beforehand? Maybe nothing. Maybe authors felt their audience would be offended if it was assumed they knew such words.
Did you happen to catch the allusion to Henry V in Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic convention?
In it, she talked about the women who have run for high public office in the past and exhorts us to work together to make Kamala the first woman president. She ended with:
I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here … that we were here…. This is our time, America. This is when we stand up….
It is the “we were here” part that caught my attention.
In Henry V, King Henry, in the field, before the battle of Agincourt, inspires his fearful and badly outnumbered troops by telling them how their courage will be remembered and how others will be sorry they were not there for that glorious fight:
This day is called the feast of Crispian:…
He that shall live this day, and see old age,… Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours… And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian’,.. This story shall the good man teach his son;…
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars….
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here…
So – hopefully – we will be here…when the first woman is elected president of the United States.
These look like great books!! Thanks for sharing