James McBride on His New Novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

James McBride’s new novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” centers on the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in a small town in Pennsylvania. What unfolds is the story of a young Black boy raised by a Jewish woman decades earlier, a story that has been closely held secret among the communities that call the area home. McBride has been writing at the intersection of race, Blackness, whiteness, and Judaism in America since his 1995 memoir “The Color of Water,” a tribute to his own Jewish mother. He speaks with the staff writer Julian Lucas. “I want to read a book that makes me feel good about being alive,” McBride says. “If I want the bad things to happen, I’ll just read the New York Times. I want a book to take me to a place that I like to be.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.1	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:14.4	James McBride's new novel opens with a skeleton found in a well.
0:19.7	We're in a small town in Pennsylvania in 1972, and then the book travels back in time to
0:25.1	the 30s to solve the mystery.
0:27.7	It's just about a little town in Pennsylvania where this Jewish woman takes in this black
0:34.6	deaf boy and the waves of activity that follow show us what America was and should be.
0:44.0	The deaf boy is known as Dodo and the Jewish woman who takes him in is Chona Ludlow,
0:49.3	and she runs the shop that gives the novel its title, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.
0:54.5	McBride's been writing about these themes since his 1996 memoir The Color of Water.
1:00.7	His book Good Lord Bird about the John Brown abolitionist uprising won a National Book
1:06.3	Award and it became a mini-series for showtime.
1:09.8	James McBride spoke the other day with Julian Lucas, a staff writer for The New Yorker.
1:15.0	Here's Julian.
1:17.2	Anyone who knows your work knows that you love to write about communities, whether that's
1:23.2	John Brown's army marching through the south or the projects in Red Hook, which you
1:29.6	fictionalized in your last novel.
1:32.6	In this one, we have the black and Jewish immigrant community of Chicken Hill in Pennsylvania.
1:39.0	I wonder if we could start by just talking a little bit about that community, how you
1:43.2	came to be interested in it and to write a book set there.
1:48.3	The truth is, I was really one of the right about this campaign to work outside Philly
1:54.6	that dealt with, that we took care of, we took care of, we learned from disabled children.
	...

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