Comedy of Life in Brooklyn

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 

by James McBride

“Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society. She did not experience the world as most people did. To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world.”   ― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store





James McBride's 381-page novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store combines elements of group comedy, cultural history, thriller, and love story. The story takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania's dilapidated Chicken Hill neighborhood, where African Americans and Jewish immigrants coexist and work side by side. The book tells the story of the people who live in Chicken Hill, how they make ends meet despite being marginalized by the larger white population, and how the country is changing quickly, as witnessed by those who were formerly enslaved and others who have recently arrived.

The author's prose style is elegant, and his development of individual characters is exceptional, providing a realism for his story that few novelists attain. I enjoyed this novel as much as his wonderful Good Lord Bird, and I look forward to more novels from James McBride.

Sportcoat the Deacon

Deacon King Kong 

by James McBride

“He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.”   ― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969, soon after the poor but close-knit community has been decimated by the arrival of heroin. The book begins with an act of vigilantism—or maybe it’s just the result of drunkenness: One morning an old widower known as Sportcoat, strengthened by a bootleg liquor called King Kong, steps into the courtyard and shoots a drug dealer in the head. The dealer survives but the aftershocks are enormous. Not only does the shooting invite the police to come sniffing around the project but it kicks off a turf war between drug gangs competing for supremacy.

The remainder of the book tells the story of a wide variety of characters held together by ties to Sportcoat. There’s a running joke in which people ask just what exactly Sportcoat does in his role as a church deacon. He enumerates a list of random odd jobs, calling himself a “holy handyman.” The author has almost as many narrative styles as characters as he shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot and blow violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II.

The result was a mixed bag for this reader. I found some of the vignettes exceptionally interesting, but just as I thought the story was beginning to coalesce it fell apart with a character or highlight that just did not work for me. The book fell short of my previous experience with this author in his historical novel about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, which I would recommend you read instead.

On the Road to Harpers Ferry

The Good Lord Bird 

by James McBride

“He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.”   ― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

With The Good Lord Bird James McBride has written an interesting and often humorous fictional account of John Brown's escapades from the days of "Burning Kansas" to his demise at Harpers Ferry.

The unlikely narrator of the events chronicled in this novel, those leading up to Brown’s quixotic raid at Harpers Ferry, is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, whose father is killed while Brown is in the process of liberating some slaves. Brown takes the 12-year-old away thinking he’s a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years. Onion, while sounding like a typical 12-year-old often makes observations that belie his age, and his fluidity of gender identity allows him a certain leeway in his life. He comments: "I weren't for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, and fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy . . ."(p 78)

And in another episode he gets taken in by Pie, a beautiful prostitute, where he witnesses some activity almost more unseemly than a 12-year-old should have to stand. The interlude with Pie occurs during a two-year period where Brown disappears from Onion’s life, but they’re reunited a few months before the debacle at Harpers Ferry. In that time, Brown visits Frederick Douglass, and, in the most implausible scene in the novel, Douglass drinks a bit too much and chases after the nubile Onion.

The stakes are raised as Brown approaches October 1859, for even Onion recognizes the futility of the raid, where Brown expects hundreds of slaves to rise in revolt and gets only a handful. Onion notes that Brown’s fanaticism increasingly approaches “lunacy” as the time for the raid gets closer, and Brown never loses that obsessive glint in his eye that tells him he’s doing the Lord’s work. At the end, Onion reasserts his identity as a male and escapes just before Brown’s execution.

The book works as an exercise in point of view and has some memorable vignettes of Brown's escapades while continually emphasizing an obsession that almost borders on lunacy. John Brown was definitely not a nice man and it was not surprising that in spite of, or perhaps because of his reputation, he was not joined by the masses of black supporters that he expected when he attempted his epic raid.