The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

James McBride, who arrived on the literary scene with his unforgettable memoir The Color of Water, has since leaned on his heritage (Black father, hard-headed resourceful Orthodox Jewish mother) to produce some lively novels. His 2023 book, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, weaves the histories of Jewish immigrants, Black people, and Italians, and the WASP contingent that controls little Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s. 

The grocery store, owned by the small Jewish community’s rabbi, is largely run by his disabled daughter Chona. When recent arrival Moshe meets her, he falls in love and they marry. Her father dies, leaving Chona the store. Despite not making money, it serves as a community hub. Pottstown has a Negro/ Jewish area called Chicken Hill. The store serves its residents, and Chona, a kind soul, lets its denizens shop on credit, hires a couple Black women to help run the store, and writes a pointed letter to the local paper about Doc Roberts, the town doctor, readily identifiable in a KKK march photo by his shoes. She doesn’t care whose sensibilities she offends with her call-out. 

Her husband runs a theater which hosts many prominent jazz musicians, drawing audience from all over. Moshe’s right-hand man, Nate, is married to Chona’s employee Addie – the Black couple are fostering (after the death of his mother) a 12-year-old injured by the explosion of a faulty stove. The boy is called Dodo, but he’s no dummy. He quit school because he couldn’t hear, so the state keeps sending enforcers to place him in Pennhurst, a medieval fortress of an institution for the crippled, retarded, and insane. Chona helps hide him – Pennhurst has a deserved and dreadful reputation – and you’ll have to read the rest yourself. 

A stove blew up in his mother’s kitchen when he was nine. Killed his eyes and ears. His eyes came back. His ears did not. But he could read lips. Nate held the lamp next to his face so Dodo could see them. “What you doing?” The boy’s eyes danced away, then he said, “Making a garden.” For what?” “To grow sunflowers.” “CJ and them said you was on a train this morning.” Dodo looked away. It was his way of ignoring conversation. 

McBride visits the minds of these characters, and we spend time with individuals from Pottstown’s different communities, understanding their behavior, language differences, and gossip. He has an ear for it!

Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, paints a stunning portrait of Black communities. Her characters, shoved to the margins by white culture, nevertheless live robustly. We meet Macon Dead (the Third), known universally as Milkman; his father Macon Dead whose fortune came from his wife’s father, a doctor, and from his own pennypinching as a landlord; Milkman’s mother Ruth, daughter of the doctor, thoroughly unhappy in her circumstances; Milkman’s aunt Pilate, younger sister of Macon, who lives with her daughter and granddaughter. Macon is not on speaking terms with these women. But when he and Pilate were children, they watched white men shoot off their father’s head as he sat on the fence of his own prospering farm awaiting their attack. 

Milkman and his best friend Guitar explore the boundaries of their world as boys, as young men, as full-fledged adults. And as those limits pinch, they push further, Milkman into his family history, Guitar into acting on behalf of their race. The WWII vets at the barbershop share their experience. “And you not going to have no ship under your command, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three.” 

Pilate is a social outcast – after her umbilicus dropped off, she healed with no navel. “Even a traveling sideshow would have rejected her, since her freak quality lacked that important ingredient – the grotesque. There was really nothing to see. Her defect, frightening and exotic as it was, was also a theatrical failure… Finally Pilate began to take offense... she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair… Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?” 

The novel really sings when Milkman, in search of a fortune found and abandoned by Macon and Pilate on the run from their father’s killers, travels south from Michigan, eventually to a village in Virginia where he is invited on a coon hunt. After tramping through dark woods, falling behind his partner, he sits against a tree and just listens to the dogs and hunters off somewhere in the night. “.. the dogs spoke to the men… and the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass chords. It was all language… No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them."

This is a beautifully written story about remarkable people – take time to read it!

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This brief book, winner of the National Book Award, consists of what a man tells his fifteen-year old son about the world, and how he may prepare himself for what lies ahead. The author is Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African American journalist who grew up in the ghettos of Baltimore and Philadelphia. His subject is the Dream, by which he means white America, and the primordial threat it represents to the African American's body:

Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society, and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white...The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again... The elevation of the belief in being white was ... achieved through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. 

Coates reviews his life, from his childhood in which If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.

But he finds freedom in the library, where he can read what he wants and learn in ways that fit his experience and curiosity. He goes on to Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, DC, where truly the best and brightest of black culture are assembled. He meets students from other cities, other countries, other world-views, and his eagerness to learn takes him to Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where every day he requests three books, and from them absorbs history, culture, philosophy. He meets, among other young people, his wife. But even within this cultural elite, the inescapable fact of their status in America is brutally present.

Prince Jones was an accomplished handsome young man, a paragon of what Howard University meant to Coates. But one night Prince Jones was murdered by a Prince Georges County, Maryland, police officer. What facts we know seem incomprehensible: Jones was driving from PG County through DC into northern Virginia to see his fiancee, and during that journey was pursued by a lone PG County undercover cop in drug dealer's clothes, through three jurisdictions, then shot in his car a block from his destination. The cop confronted Jones with his gun drawn and no badge. The cop's quarry was a drug dealer whose physique was not even remotely similar to Jones'. He claimed Jones tried to run over him with his jeep. During the inquiry, it was learned: The officer was a known liar. A year earlier he had arrested a man on false evidence. Prosecutors had been forced to drop every case in which the officer was involved. The officer was demoted, restored, then put out on the street to continue his work...[after the inquiry into Jones' death, the officer] was charged with nothing. He was punished by no one. He was returned to his work... 

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects - are the product of democratic will... The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

Coates delineates an unbridgeable gap between white America and the lives of black people. He traces this schism to the roots of our country, in which slave-holders prevailed in keeping slavery legal in the new nation. He is not wrong about the peril of being black in America, where no matter who you are, if you're black you can be shot down by a police officer - or citizen - so blinded by fear that imagining a weapon in a black man's hand is sufficient cause to kill him - and be exonerated for doing so.

Coates does not believe in God. He believes that body and soul are one, and that this life is all we have. He knows he is living in the cross-hairs, vulnerable at any moment to have his body taken from him by someone he does not know, who sees in him only a threat. He conveys this danger to his son, hoping it will not keep him from expressing his vitality.

Given the outcome of our recent election, what can people he identifies as white do?
We can challenge the militarizing of police departments: using armored vehicles and body armor and automatic weapons reinforces the attitude that they are at war, constantly under threat, patrolling for enemies, ready for combat.
We can challenge the justice system that allows murderers to walk free if those they killed were black.
We can challenge the penal system, in which for-profit prisons create a demand for cells to be filled.
We can challenge our own assumptions and fears, which form the basis of this deadly system.