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?”

That afternoon as the two slowly made their walk home, Chona tried to raise the matter again. “You’re not a sparrow, Bernice. You’re a robin.” But Bernice was sullen and silent.

Chona realized, for the first time, that Bernice was like the twins at shul, Irv and Marvin. Their father, Mr. Norman, who had made her special boot so carefully, was the same way. They were bottled up inside. There was something that was closed. She realized, looking at Bernice, that something inside her had turned off in some kind of way, like a water fixture closed tightly or a lamp that refused to light. But at age six, Chona couldn’t express what it was. Instead, she grasped Bernice’s hand and said, “I like flowers better than birds.” She received a small smile in return.

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.

Chona wasn’t one of them. She was the one among them who ruined his hate for them, and for that he resented her. Miss Chona. She wasn’t Miss Chona when they were kids. She was just Chona, his sister’s best friend, the odd girl with the limp who walked to school with Bernice, the two walking behind him, ignoring him, which was fine with him in those days. But then life happened. He’d gone to jail after high school, and when he returned home, the die was cast. Chona got married and went back to being white […] It frustrated him, thinking of [Chona and Bernice’s] friendship. He wanted no part of either of them. […] He had to make his own way in the world. Where was the money to be made in fooling around in that complicated mess? He had to survive. That’s just the way it was.

“The land don’t belong to the people that rules it, see. And it’s made some of ’em, the best of ’em, the most honest of ’em, it’s made ’em crazy. We is in the same place, you and I, being colored. We are visitors here. Thing is, us Lowgods, wherever we is from , the old Africaland, I suppose, we were keepers of our fellow man. That was our purpose. We’re still that way. That’s all we know of our history, the one that was moved from us before we was brung here. You know what Lowgod means in our language? Little parent. We know most folks are weak and wisdom is hard to know. So the poor souls at Penhurst is not hard for us to handle. […] The patients aren’t hard to deal with. It’s the workers. The doctors and medical people and so forth. Those are the hard ones.”

Bernice sighed. “I got one question. And after you answer it, I’ll leave what I brung you and go on about my business. And I don’t want to see you no more and have nothing to do with you because I have lived too long and you are too nasty. I know I’m a hard woman. I’ve made a few mistakes in life. But I’m no worse than these other mothers out here who pray, ‘Lord, let my child be wise and good’ when they really mean ‘Let this child have more power and money than I have.’ I don’t do that with my children. That’s what our father did to us. He built things. The Jewish church, a lot of houses and buildings and things. He tried to build us, too. But he never finished. Maybe he wasn’t building us the right way when he left this life. Maybe that’s why we’re like we are now.”

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.