The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

Exasperated, Moshe pointed out the kitchen window towards Pottstown below. “Down the hill is America!”

But Chona was adamant. “America is here.”

“This area is poor. Which we are not. It is Negro. Which we are not. We are doing well!”

“Because we serve, you see? That is what we do. The Talmud says it. We must serve.”

“But the Negro is our only customer here.”

“Hasn’t their money always spent?”

“That’s not the issue.”

His hands were on the table cradling a cup of tea. She gently placed one of her hands over his. “Don’t you see what they have, Moshe? Don’t you see the well they draw from?”

“What well? What are you talking about?”

Nate, high on the ladder, stared down in silence a moment, then said, “You want it what?”

“Soldered shut. I’m sending it overseas to my friend Malachi. It’s a joke.”

“I don’t know how to solder.”

“You know anyone who can?”

“Fatty learned to solder over at the Flagg factory. He can do it. He solders stuff all day.”

“Can you ask him?”

There was a long silence. From the floor, Moshe watched Nate lift up his head to stare into the dark shadows of the walkway above, the network of pulleys, ropes, and skeletal metal rods that lived atop the stage.

“I’ll get it done.”

Moshe placed the can on the floor. The delight in this silly exchange lightened his heart, and he began to think things through more clearly […]

She watched him sag and lean against the wall. His tall frame stooped, his eyes cast down in shame. She loved the gentle slope of his nose, the curve of his jaw, the way his head moved when he looked down, the arc of his shoulders. She placed a hand on the side of his face and rubbed it gently.

“You can forever remember the wrongs done to you as long as you live,” she said. “But if you forget ’em and go on living, it’s almost as good as forgiving. I don’t care who you was, or what you done, or even what you calls yourself. I know your heart. You look so tired.”

She snatched his hand and fiercely and held it to her chest over her heart. Nate felt a surge of that old feeling, that shine, the light that she lit in him, and the anvil that sat atop his heart lifted.

A week after she’d been assaulted, Chona, lying in her hospital bed, found herself awake with the words of the song-prayer Barukh She’amar swirling about her head like butterflies. She felt the prayer more than she heard it; it started from somewhere deep down and fluttered toward her head like tiny flecks of light, tiny beacons moving like a school of fish, continually swimming away from a darkness that threatened to swallow them. She was witnessing a dance, she realized, one that originated in a place far out of her view, someplace she had never been before. Her lips felt suddenly dry. She was overcome by a sudden massive thirst and must have announced it, for water came from somewhere. She felt it touch her throat and heard the words of the prayer, “Blessed be the One who spoke the world into being.” She was grateful.

They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them […] into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.

“If it’s all the same to you, we got one or two ideas ’bout how to fetch him out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. A lawyer will get it done. This is a land of laws.”

“White folks’ laws,” Nate said softly, “The minute you leave the room, the next white fella comes along and the law is how he says it is. And the next one comes along and the law is how he says it is. So whatever money you burns up to get Dodo, come time Doc Roberts and his kind gets ahold of whatever rulin’s your man fixed up, they’ll put another rulin’s together and make sure Dodo goes back in that place again and never gets out. […] The law in this land is what the white man says it is, mister. Plain and simple. So you’d be wasting your dollars on us.”

On the wards, the attendants run everything. They can restrain a patient long as they want, for hours or days or even weeks, so long as they write in the logbook exactly how long they done it. They restrained this poor woman for six hundred fifty-one hours and twenty minutes. I happens to know the woman, and if I was in charge, I would put those that done that to her in the straitjacket and give her the key. And if I were not a God-fearing woman, I’d give that woman a little bit of my own body dirt to toss at them that done that to her, along with whatever she could come up with, for some of them attendants are evil somethings. They got to watch their points, some of them. Because a lot of them patients, they do not forget.

All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world […] owned by men creating great companies that made […] weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another. Any man could buy one and walk into schools and bring death to dozens of children and teacher and anyone else stupid enough to believe in all that American mythology of hope, freedom, equality, and justice. The problem always was, and would always be, the niggers and the poor—and the foolish white people who felt sorry for them.