The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Study Guide

James McBride was born in New York City in 1957, the eighth of his mother’s 12 children and the last child she had with McBride’s father, the Reverend Andrew McBride. His parents were a mixed-race couple during an era when such marriages were illegal throughout much of the United States. His mother, Ruth, was the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who grew up primarily in Virginia and left her abusive and religiously repressive home when she was a young woman. Although she converted to Christianity and became a devout Christian following her marriage to McBride, her Jewish heritage continued to influence her worldview and colored her children’s lives. Rev. McBride died at the age of 45 from lung cancer, after which McBride’s mother eventually married her second husband, with whom she had another four children. McBride attended New York City Public Schools through high school, then studied music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio and journalism at Columbia University in New York. In addition to working as a jazz saxophonist, McBride is the author of eight books—five novels, two works of nonfiction (including a memoir honoring his mother) and one collection of short stories. He was awarded the American National Humanities Medal in 2015, and he has won the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Kirkus Award, and the Jewish Fiction Award. His works have been translated into 16 languages.

The Pennhurst State School and Hospital, originally named the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, was opened in 1908. Commissioned to care for mentally and physically disabled Pennsylvania residents, Pennhurst quickly became a place to incarcerate any number of people deemed undesirable by their communities or by American society, including criminals and immigrants. Such categories of undesirability proliferated during the early 20th century thanks to prominence of the eugenics movement, which allegedly aimed to improve humanity through selective breeding. In practice, this often meant othering and vilifying marginalized groups (religious minorities, the poor, Indigenous and Black people, unmarried mothers) and targeting them for incarceration, sterilization, or both. Immigrants were often considered undesirable, and a series of immigration reforms in the 1920s and 1930s sought to control their numbers. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 ended immigration from Asia and imposed strict quotas on immigration from allegedly undesirable Eastern and Southern European countries. The American Eugenics movement was an inspiration to the Nazi Party as it consolidated power in the 1930s, a situation which the more politically astute members of the Chicken Hill Jewish community are watching closely throughout the book. By the time Pennhurst closed in 1978, however, the disability rights movement was fighting for a change in the way American society treats people living with all kinds of disabilities. Several key court cases affirming the rights of disabled individuals to receive education, to not be removed from society, and to live lives free of abuse and neglect, began at Pennhurst, brought by patients and former patients and their families.

In The Heaven & Earth Grocery store, the actions of Jewish and Black communities of Pottstown, PA, converge on the twin injustices of Dodo’s incarceration in Pennhurst and Doc Roberts’ violent attack on Chona. Issues of civil rights, racism, and disability rights swirl throughout the novel, which gestures toward the historical partnership between various communities during the civil rights movement. Readers interested in this convergence might turn next to Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, published in 2020 by Jewish and Disabled activist Judith Heumann, which details the author’s fight for an equal education and equal opportunities to her able-bodied peers. Simone Zelitch’s 2015 novel Waveland concerns the involvement of around 1,000 White, primarily Jewish volunteers organizing in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1967. Non-fiction books covering the same territory include Cheryl Lynn Greenberg’s Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (for a general overview) or David Kushner’s Levittown, for a more specific slice of history covering the partnership of Black and Jewish families in integrating a typical post-War Pennsylvania suburb in the 1950s. James McBride’s family memoir, The Color of Water, covers in detail his own experiences as the mixed-race child of a Polish Jewish immigrant and a Black American, as well as his mother’s experiences navigating racial politics in the American South as a White and Jewish person.