The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store joins a project that unites McBride’s work—four other novels, one short-story collection, a biography of James Brown, and a memoir, The Color of Water : He is resurrecting lost histories of coexistence. Our current era of wrecking-ball polemics lends his oeuvre an air of wishfulness and, at the same time, makes the work that much more relevant. Reading McBride just feels good—we are comforted and entertained, and braced for the hard lessons he also delivers. Plunged into McBride’s crowds, you can’t help falling a little in love with a character called Monkey Pants (who teaches Dodo how to navigate the perils of Pennhurst), or a whole passel of people with the last name Lowgod (Pottstown’s sage outliers). The style is improvisational, colloquial, and satiric. Listen to one of Chicken Hill’s own warn against doing domestic work in white folk’s houses: “The men grope and the women mope.” It’s funny despite, or perhaps because of, its truth—and conveyed with a wit that exposes the gropers and mopers as the most pitiable and poor of spirit in Pottstown.
Each of these characters has troubles aplenty. In that sense, all of them are alone in a crowd. But it is the crowd that keeps the past, and the difficult present, from overwhelming them. The only way forward is coalition, however messy and painful. The point isn’t just that strength lies in numbers; in McBride’s books, community is a place of recognition, of inventiveness and joy-making, and a hedge against despair and the daily grind of living with limited options.
That despair has deep roots that can be traced back to the nation’s beginnings. We live with the consequences—political, social, and legislative—of foundational segregation and its accompanying isolation. McBride has set two novels, most notably the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird (2013), during the slave past, and seems to echo Alexis de Tocqueville’s antebellum diagnosis of our national character. Americans in their fledgling democracy, Tocqueville observed in his travels,
are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.