The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

He had never seen so many Jews in one place in America in his life. The reform snobs from Philadelphia were there in button-down shirts, standing next to ironworkers from Pittsburgh, who crowded against socialist railroad men from Reading wearing caps bearing the Pennsylvania Railroad logo, who stood shoulder to shoulder with coal miners with darkened faces from Uniontown and Spring City. Some were with wives. Others were with women who, given their fur coats, leather boots, and dazzling hairdos, were not wives at all. […] Some yammered in German, others chatted in Yiddish. Some yelled in a Bavarian dialect, others spoke Polish. When Moshe announced there would be a short delay, the crowd grew more restless.

Later that night, he took the matter to Chona. “What if I open my theater to the colored?”

“So?”

“The goyim won’t like that.”

Chona was standing at the stove cooking dinner, her back to him. She laughed and raised her spoon in the air, spinning it in a circle. That was her gift. Not an ounce of bitterness or shred of shame. Unlike Moshe, Chona was an American. She had been born in Pottstown. She was a familiar sight in Chicken Hill in her worn woolen dress, old sweater, and wearing her special-soled boot that cost a fortune, laughing and joking with the neighbors. She seemed to know every family. When Moshe came home for lunch and even late at night, he often found his wife standing in front of the store laughing with one of the local Negroes. […]

“What does it matter what they think? The coloreds’ money spends just like ours.”

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?”

[The smell] seemed to sprout from the granite walls as the stretcher moved, like moss or vines rising from the floor and covering the walls, the smell becoming a living, breathing thing, gorging on the walls, the windows, and finally him, evolving from strong to horrible to overpowering. He felt as if he were drowning. As the stretcher spun through the corridors, turning one corner and the next, he nearly passed out, but the motion kept him conscious, and the smell poured on him, coming again and again, stronger and stronger, morphing into new life […] the smells here bore a different message. Cruelty. Anger. Powerful loneliness. And death. And as the stretcher rolled deeper into the corridors, his throat finally surged, and the contents of his stomach ran up his throat.

He raised his head and vomited over the side of the stretcher. […The attendants] stopped, departed for a moment, and returned with a straitjacket.

He liked to place his hands on the phonograph speaker to hear the music as the record played. It didn’t matter to him that he could hear just a tiny bit of it. Just the act of listening fired the music inside of him. And when Uncle Nate sometimes led a group of workers cleaning up Mr. Moshe’s theater in singing his favorite old gospel hymn, “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go,” Dodo sang along out of tune, much to the amusement of the men.

“I know a song, Monkey Pants,” he said. “Wanna hear it?”

Without waiting for an answer, he sang.

I’ll go where You want me to go.
I’ll say what You want me to say. […]

Monkey Pants stared, unblinking, wide-eyed, his eyebrows lifted. His face eased into something like a smile, and in that moment, Dodo felt comforted and a little less lonely.

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.

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.”

Monkey Pants turned back to him, facing him through the bars of the crib, his spastic head shaking back and forth, his expression saying, “What do you want me to do? I can’t make you understand.”

“We’re not finished,” Dodo said.

So they went at it again, driven only by the aching loneliness of their existence, two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers, living in an insane asylum, the insanity of it seeming to live on itself and charge them, for despite the horribleness of their situation, they were cheered by the tiniest of things, the crinkle of an eyelid, an errant cough, an occasional satisfied grunt or burst of laughter as the other one bumbled about in confused impatience with the other, trying to figure out how to communicate the origins of Monkey Pants’s precious marble. It was outrageous.

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.

He knew that talking after lights out would bring an angry attendant, perhaps even Son of Man himself, but he could not help himself. He sobbed out, “Monkey Pants.”

He felt a soft tap on the bars of his crib. He was so exhausted that he could not turn on his side. Instead, lying on his back, he flung an arm through the crib bars into the dark and swept his hand blindly through the air. Once. Twice. Until he felt an arm. Then a wrist. Then a finger. One finger. One finger like before.

He placed his finger to it.

“Thank you, Monkey Pants.”

He lay there like that, their fingers connected, till he fell asleep.

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.