There is a smell that certain old grocery stores have. Pickles, yes. But also damp cardboard, loose tobacco, the faint sweetness of rotten fruit that someone should have thrown out yesterday. James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store smells like that. You close the book and the smell stays in your clothes.
The store sits in Chicken Hill, a neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where no one had much but everyone had someone. The 1920s and 30s, mostly. A Jewish couple, Moshe and Chona, run the place. Chona limps and refuses to turn anyone away, even when they cannot pay. Moshe has a theater downtown and a wife who will not stop feeding the whole block. They are not saints. They are just tired of watching people fall.
Underneath the store, decades later, someone finds a skeleton. The novel drifts back and forth across time, showing you how it got there. A boy falls into a well. A deaf girl named Dodo gets sent to a state school where children disappear. A white cop named Dec decides that Chicken Hill is a problem he can solve with a badge and a gun. None of these events seem connected at first. But McBride is patient. He ties them together the way a neighbor ties a knot in a rope you did not know you needed.
I used to walk past a grocery store like this on my way to school. The owner, Mr. Kim, gave me a free bag of chips every Friday for no reason. I did not think about him for twenty years. Then I read about Chona, and I remembered the way Mr. Kim’s hand always smelled like soap. That is what this book does. It reaches into the back of your memory and pulls out someone you did not know you owed.
The middle of the book is slow, but the slow parts are not filler. They are the point. You watch a woman fry fish on a Friday night. You watch two old men argue about a broken pipe. You watch a kid hide in a crawlspace while a policeman walks past. McBride writes dialogue that does not sound like dialogue. It sounds like people who have known each other too long and stopped caring about proper sentences.
Dec is the villain, but he is not the point. The point is how the people of Chicken Hill lie to him. They lie smoothly, easily, like breathing. They have been lying to men like Dec for generations. The skeleton under the grocery store is not a mystery to be solved. It is a promise kept. A child was in danger, and the adults did what adults are supposed to do. They did not call the cops. They called each other.
Chona dies in the middle of the book. Not a hero’s death. Just a quiet one, in her bed, with Moshe holding her hand. The store does not last much longer after that. Moshe sells it. The neighborhood changes. The people scatter. But the skeleton stays. And when someone finally digs it up, they do not call the police. They call a neighbor. Old habits.
“They had been children once, and now they were not.” That line comes near the end, and it landed on my chest like a stack of old newspapers. Heavy. Slightly dusty. Not unwelcome.
I finished the book on a Tuesday, not a Sunday. I did not sit quietly and reflect. I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. But while I ate, I thought about Mr. Kim. I wondered if his store was still there. I looked it up on my phone. It was not. It closed in 2014. I wished I had told him thank you.
That is the gift McBride gives you. Not a lesson. Just a reminder that the people who held you up probably never knew how tired their arms got. You cannot go back and tell them. But you can read a book and remember.
If you want a tidy plot with a satisfying resolution, this will frustrate you. If you want a novel that feels like sitting on a porch swing while someone tells you about the summer the whole town fell apart and then put itself back together with duct tape and stubbornness, pull up a chair.
