A Place of Hope and Humanity: A Guest Post from James McBride
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is the story of how the people of Chicken Hill — the neighborhood in Pottstown, Pa., where immigrant Jews and African Americans live side by side — came together to protect a deaf Black child named Dodo. At the heart of the novel are Chona Ludlow, a rabbi’s daughter who runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store; her husband, Moshe; and his Black employee Nate Timblin, who together fight to keep Dodo from being institutionalized.
While the novel is (I hope) involving and funny, the inspiration for it originated in a place of hope and humanity: The Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, Pa., where I worked for four summers in the 1970s. It was run by an extraordinary man named Sy Friend. Sy’s camp changed my life and the lives of most of the staff there. The kids, whose humanity, joy, intelligence, and courage made terms like “disabled” and “handicapped” seem like misnomers, taught us everything, and “Uncle Sy” was their voice. They loved him with a pure, unequivocal love I had never witnessed. A child’s love is pure. A differently abled child’s love is purest of all, because it carries with it the experience of witness. These kids had folks talking over their heads their entire lives. Sy never did. He spoke with them. He loved them as equals. And they loved him back with an unforgettable power.
I always wanted to write about that pure love. I tried for years. Only after my mother died in 2010 did it occur to me that pure love coupled with humanity add up to a kind of equality, and that this equality shows itself in many forms, in many places, and in many ways. It came to me when I stumbled into Pottstown while researching the nearby Pennhurst Institute for the Mentally Ill. I was not taken by Pennhurst, with its horrible history, but I was impressed with Pottstown, its prideful beauty, its people and their kind hospitality. Only then did this novel start to take shape in my mind and heart: the idea that humanity and love, while not exactly the same, wear the same dress, the same shoes, and the same hat.
I wanted to honor the camp, the town, and especially my grandmother, whose struggles are chronicled, in part, in my first book, The Color of Water. Hudis Shilsky lived an isolated, difficult life. She was a kind-hearted, Polish-born Jew disabled by polio. She ran a small store in the Black section of Suffolk, Va., a town where Jews were not entirely welcome. She spoke Yiddish, not English. Two of her three children ran away from home and never returned. Her husband didn’t love her.
So I put her on the page in Chona Ludlow and made her loved.
In doing so, I found my novel, where every one of every religion, race, color, and economic background had a voice. Because the founders of the camp, Jewish theater owners all, believed in equality. They believed in tikkun olam, healing the world.
We need healing now. All of us. It is my prayer and hope that this book grants us the space to find some of that healing.
