Poured Over: James McBride on The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

By Jenna Seery / August 8, 2023 at 6:00 am

“People who love books, we’re the last line of reason and discourse…”

National Book Award winner James McBride’s newest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store showcases the complicated and compassionate lives of the inhabitants of a small Pennsylvania town. McBride joins us to discuss the research he does, his personal connections to the book, telling stories that need to be told and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    
         
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode):
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and James McBride. Oh, wow. Does James McBride actually need an introduction? I mean, think about it. Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award. Deacon King Kong was an Oprah Pick and everyone, everyone remembers The Color of Water, which is his memoir that kind of kicked off everything. And now we’ve got The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which is fabulous. It’s the new novel. It’s just out. So obviously, we’re going spoiler free in this conversation. James, thank you so much for making the time to join us today.

James McBride
Well, as they say, on NPR, thank you for having me. They tell you to say thank you for having me.

MM
You know, we’re not fancy. I’m a bookseller. I’m just excited to talk to you about your work because I love your books and Heaven and Earth opens a little bit like Good Lord Bird, actually, you do a little flashback thing. And then suddenly, we’re in the middle of what 1936, in a tiny part of a town in Pennsylvania, and I’m hoping you’ll set it up a little bit, because that’ll set me up to ask you a question.

Well, I can’t remember how Good Lord Bird opens.

The flashback with Onion. Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s right. We got it’s basically a flashback like how we

Yeah, it was just one of those things. That character who opens the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, is an old Jewish guy that the cops know, a suspect of a murderer. And they go to see him and, and then he begins, he basically points the reader in the direction of the story, the first chapter, or the first part of the book, the first three pages of just sets up the story then allows us to get into that world of, you know, this, this part of town called Chicken hill, where all the Blacks and Jews live. And it’s the 1930s. And it’s every man for himself. It’s sort of a microcosm of small town America, my small town America is different than like the Mayberry, small town America, seeing the Andy Griffith Show. And the truth is that most small town Americans were not like Mayberry. A lot of them were like Pottstown, which is my, which is there’s real Pottstown this is, you know, a lot of fictional elements. But, you know, the Blacks and Jews and poor immigrants, Irish Italian live. And that’s where a lot of the fun happens. Right now, a lot of the action.

We’ve got a Jewish couple, Chona, and Moshe. And they have a grocery store on Chicken Hill, the Heaven and Earth Grocery. And there were bits of Chona that I felt like I had met before. And you sent me back with this new novel, you sent me back to The Color of Water, which is your story and your mom’s story and your sibling story. And there’s some bits where I think your mom is a lot of this book, and her mom is a bit of Chona, too.

I mean, Chona is a disabled person from polio and my grandmother had polio. And I mean, it’s just kind of landed in the grocery store because it initially began at the theater with Moshe, but he falls in love with this, you know, he’s a Jewish guy, immigrant from Romania. He falls in love with a, you know, Jewish girl, a woman, young woman, who happens to be working in a grocery store. It’s owned by her father. So I had a lot of reference because my grandmother was married to, you know, so called rabbi. And my mother was raised in that in that grocery store in Suffolk, Virginia. So a kind of a lot of the experiences that Chona had, I didn’t have to reach far for that character to come to life and start moving around. I mean, at some point, it did occur to me that I wanted, you know, my grandmother, my real grandmother, my Jewish one, did not have a very happy life, in part because her husband was a mess. And, you know, she was isolated in this small town in the south where anti semitism was very rampant. And so I wanted to show that I went to my grandmother had to have a better life. So I put on the page, and I made her loved but I want to say I made her loved. Chona was loved by everybody, because she was so far ahead of things. You know, because it because of my mother’s history and my own history, I suppose I have become a fan of Jewish women in the early part of the 20th century, like, in like Belle Moscowitz and Emma Goldman and people like that. These were mavericks, man, they were like far out, you know, and they had to do a lot of hiding and ducking and all this business, but they got the business done. So, you know, a lot of these things were fused into Chona’s character and then she just she started to roll and in my books character start to take over and it just took over the book. She was great. I mean, you know, she’s wonderful character and then of course, She and her husband come up with this problem where they have to, you know, they’re confronted with this business of having to hide this deaf Black child, boy from the state. And it’s really shown his idea it’s really shown as accepts the challenge. The husband doesn’t really but she does and ends up joining the whole community into the chicken hill into the dramas that take place inside that Heaven and Earth grocery store. And of course, you know, several important Black characters involved as well.

It’s very much a James McBride novel. There’s a lot, that shaggy dog story kind of quality to Deacon King Kong. There’s a lot of that here, you introduce characters and I’m like, okay, where are we going? What’s happening here? Really excellent. There is a musicality, though there is a musicality to your novels, even for talking about Good Lord Bird. There is something not just in the dialogue, not just in the characters names, I mean, Fatty and Paper and Dodo and Monkey Pants. And, I mean, there’s some great names of characters in this book, but it’s also just the way you talk about the place itself, the way people come together, it’s on even when you’re talking about complicated stuff.

The sum of your life is what you pay attention to. And so all of us have complicated pieces of business, we talked off camera, you know, you said, your brother plays the saxophone, he plays Selmer. And, you know, I know what a Selmer is, I have a say, I have Selmer, and he sees that he doesn’t have a Selmer with me, he has his other horn. And I, you know, as a saxophone player, I know, like, if a cat has a Selmer, and he doesn’t have it with him, he’s probably not playing, like he’s not playing Carnegie Hall, he’s probably playing something, you know, not quite as important, he can kick it around, knock it around a little bit. But, you know, it’s something only something that he and I would know, or you because you’re his sister, but the point is that he’s still making the music of somebody, and he’s simplifying somebody’s life, and he’s making somebody a little bit happier. Today, when he picks up that one and sticks it in his mouth, that’s what counts. A lot of the stuff that we go through doesn’t count. So, you know, when I try to do my books, is I really want people to show I just want to show how we get along. And we manage despite the complexity of things. And despite that, you know, we living in a world with, you know, evil, us often succeed and villain succeed, and heroes sometimes die, we still managed to get along pretty good and sometimes have fun at the same time. I mean, that’s what I’m trying to do.

The amount of laughter. Like, I’m not openly cautious if I’m reading you in public, because people need to be prepared for me to be very loud, and laughing a lot when I’m reading your stuff. But this book feels a little more personal for you, I think, than the last couple. And I know, you know, you talked about Deacon King Kong and how those characters come out of people you knew in your childhood, right? Like, you actually knew people like Hot Sausage and Chicken, you have written a whole riff on Chicken Man in The Color of Water. And I’m just wondering if that made you looser on the page, if that let you go places you hadn’t gone before. It really does feel like you’re, you’re in it in a different kind of way in this book.

I am actually you know, I mean, not that I never thought of it that way. I was always a little bit reluctant to write about Jewish characters, right? Because, you know, Jewish readers can really be fussy when I did The Color of Water, you know, I go around, people say, why did you say this? And you know, I mean, if you can find two Jewish people would agree on anything. Like I’ll give you $100 right now, I mean, so I didn’t really want to get into that too much. Because I didn’t really want to do you know, the idea of going around and publicizing a book, and then having people raise their hand and say, you know, something, what you should have said, because I just think that it gets into like, a lot of complicated business of people’s lives that I really don’t want to, I’m not interested in it. If you have like some kind of moral religious thing to play. I ain’t the guy to be doing that with. But I did love my mother. And I did love her mother, although I never met her. And I’ve gotten to know several members of my Jewish family. And we’re complicated family. But we’re still a family. Right? And we still laugh a lot. We still have lots of things that are good for people to hear. But so I wanted to kind of explore that. That part of my creativity and also, I worked at this camp when I was in college that was run by a Jewish guy. And he was just an extraordinary guy. He was gay and you know, he had to hide it, although we all knew it and it was just a great experience for us. We all learned a lot when I say we I mean staff, we learned more from him and the kids than we learned from anywhere else in many ways and I want it to honor him. And that’s how the book really started. It really started to honor him in this camp. I couldn’t write about a camp, it was like it was campy, you know, then the singing. So it just didn’t work. It didn’t capture the wildness of it. Yeah, and the improvisational quality of life it because it was run by someone who really believed in equality for all people. And it got me to notice the thinking about the notions of, and I was hired by an old Jewish guy, and the camp was founded by some old Jewish, Romanian Jewish theater owners. And you know, these people were interesting folks, guess what they had interesting stories. So this is what happens when you just, when you when you play the melody good enough, you can start playing, the jazz follows, you know.

We’ve got the theater sort of down the slope from Chicken Hill, right. I mean, that’s sort of how the layout of the landscape is, Moshe’s theater is, sort of downhill. Grocery store is, in the hills, in Chicken Hill, right? And the way you bring all of these storylines, together, when I think of you, as a writer, I think of the love that you put on the community and the way you write about people who don’t usually get written about, right, like, maybe the famous theater owners get written about at some point kind of thing. But like, you’re writing about people who do get left out of a lot of stories.

Well, that’s where I live, you know, that’s where I live I mean, those are my people, man. And they have the most interesting people. I mean, they use the music metaphor, beat it to death, it’s not the first trumpet player that’s really interesting. It’s the third violinist you know, who’s, and this is, this is her third date this month. This is only, she’s at three dates. The first one good, and this is the third one. And there’s no more dates, no more gigs, until next month, that’s a person who’s got an interesting life. And, you know, as an African American who grew up and African American life in New York, you know, I’ve met lots of people like that, at this camp, for instance, I was talking about muscles, people who work that didn’t become famous, and they did very well — became schoolteachers and medical doctors and lawyers. But you know, nobody knows them. But I know that, and the kids were like, the kids were life changing. So, I mean, that’s why I live I’m not the kind of writer who can go to Florida and kick it, you know, look at the beach and drink, you know, drink little, whatever they drink. I can’t do that lose my mind. You know?

When did you start working on Heaven and Earth Grocery Store?

A long time ago, I started in maybe like 2008, I went to Norristown State Hospital and taught my way in, okay. And the people they were kind enough to let me see the place and walk around and even the patients and go to the library and go walk in the tunnels underneath. And that’s when the research started because I you know, I started writing about a camp and I ended up looking at state hospitals for the so called mental insane, and I couldn’t get into Penhurst, but I could get into Norristown, which was still functioning, Penhurst State Hospital which makes an appearance in this book in any case, I started it and then I stopped it and you know got you know, Deacon King Kong and Good Lord Bird going again. Now you’re always pregnant, you always got something going so that’s I’m always working on something while I’m working on something else. And you know, you hope it’s just you know, it comes together, so it took a long time.

Yeah. Wait so at one point you’re working on these three amazing books at once.

Well, I was working on, I mean, I think the Good Lord Bird, doing while Heaven and Earth Grocery Store research. And then I just set it aside. And then I rolled into Deacon King Kong and I didn’t do too much with Heaven and Earth after Deacon King Kong. I got back into it. I always had like I would go at times I would go visit you know, when I would travel for one of these books, I was chatting with my band, I’m a traveling musician, if I went somewhere and there was like a closed insane asylum something nearby I go see it. I visited, I’d ask people who had experiences with it and so forth. So I was always kind of have my eye on getting it right. But that was the hardest part of the book to write really about, you know, life in that place with the Dodo the kid.

You have a great line though about friendship between Dodo and his buddy Monkey Pants that is two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, the insanity seeming to live on in itself and change them for despite the horribleness of their situation, they were cheered by the tiniest of things like here, these two little boys are. And I’m not going to go too deep into it, because I feel like it’s a giant piece of the book. But I love these little boys, Dodo, and Monkey Pants are amazing characters, but you really have to step out of being an adult to write kids like this.

Well, you know, the truth is that I knew kids like Dodo. And when I was at the Ryder Cup camp, what really struck me about them when I first started working with them, and also the years that I worked with him, I still know a few of them. They are quite normal. I mean, you know, you get beyond the, you know, the physical part, or even some of the mental part, you’re dealing with kids who are really smart, know how to get on your nerves. Know how to poke you where you hurt, I mean, and who rarely ever complain about anything, we’re so happy to be living and breathing, that they know what’s important. And when you’ve never seen real joy until you’ve the experience, how some of these kids find joy in the in the smallest of places. So, you know, one of the great sadnesses I had while writing the book was, was when Dodo has to enter this place, you know, so, and that created some plot issues as well, because you can’t leave the reader with the kid in there, you know, you got to you got it, you got to get them out some kind of way. And you know, oftentimes, at least in my books, plot, you know, character and plot a weaves together and they these situations kind of come together. And then you, you’re hoping that one of these, one of these things will unroll properly so that it comes out in a way that gives you and the reader some hope.

There’s a little bit of a caper flick happening in the big part of this book, which was a treat, because it’s like you said, you’ve got to figure out how to unroll this how to how to get the story where you need it to go. And it’s kind of classic.

I mean, you’re just making my day the way you’re chatting up. But I had a lot of characters to work with, you know, I had a lot of characters that that I could work with, to do this, to help Dodo get rolled out. I mean, the power of the book really is that Chona was a loving person, was loved so much. That, you know, what emanated from her and sort of pushed into everyone else’s life and push the evil aside. And that’s the kind of world that I like to visit and be part of and hope that people would be amenable to learning about. I don’t want to write a book that depresses people why? I can’t read a depressing book. No.

When you have characters like these, you kind of don’t need, it’s really satisfying. That’s the one thing I keep coming back to when I read books like Heaven and Earth Grocery Store or Deacon King Kong or Good Lord Bird, there’s a verve and a style and just kind of an irreverence to what you’re doing where you’re just kind of like, well, I know, these are the stories you’ve heard before about other things. But I’m going to actually show you what the world is like, right? Like, you know, there’s that riff you have on the American dream when we’re talking about baseball, in Deacon King Kong and baseball is not my game. But the way you talk about how sort of, yeah, we think it’s this one thing, and actually, it turns out to be nothing like it. Right, or, you know, all of Good Lord Bird and John Brown and Frederick Douglass. And here’s little endian being like, well, those two, you know, those guys that you keep hearing about, here I am, and I’m actually going to tell you the story.

Don’t meet your heroes in this world. You’d be you’d be totally disappointed. So it’s better that you just have some guy or some sort of person on the side saying, you know, listen, check this out. This is what really, that’s much better and much more interesting to me and much better than somebody telling me what I should be thinking about it. So look, at one point in my life, in my rather long life, I worked at People Magazine, you know, I covered Michael Jackson for the People Magazine for six months, like exclusively, you know, I’ve traveled with him and all this. And one of the things that magazine really did well, was that it just talked about like a little bit of the gossipy things, but then it threw a little taste of the news in the at the same time. Little gossipy, a little news, a little gossipy, a little news. That was frankly the only thing I got out of it because I really hated working there. But there is, people listen to a story. It always begins this way. This is a story about a woman who you know, It’s a story about a man who say about a person who whatever. People don’t really worry about the, you know, the gross national product, if you want to really know how a country is doing, you don’t ask about the gross national product. Yes. And how did they treat their children and their old people? That’s, it’s about people. So books about people.

You ask a question, though, in Heaven and Earth, and I feel like it pops up in in other books as well. But like, how do you restore something that never existed? Right? Like, you’ve got all of these folks, Chona and Moshe, and Fatty and Beatrice and Paper and all of these characters who are living their own lives, they know they’re living outside of sort of, let’s call it a standard narrative, right? Like there’s a whole part of the town with the doctor. And then there’s a town Councilman who’s really quite a piece of work and make some bad business decisions. And so the entire you sort of take the whole story and say, Well, listen. Yeah, you don’t actually know what you think, you know. And it’s really subversive and fun, in a way, and I’m wondering where you’re started, like, I think you start with character, right? Like, isn’t that where it always starts for you?

We can all stand our own dirt. Right? But we sit can’t seem to stand dirt of others, no matter what, no matter how, no matter who they are. And that grind is where characters sit up on the page and start moving around. I mean, you can get them to sit up on the page. But to get them to walk from one room to the next you’ve got, there’s got to be some grind between them. Some secret, they have some thing that that rolls out, they don’t want everyone to see. I mean, like, I can’t look at myself in the mirror sideways. When I look at myself in the mirror sideways, I say, oh my god, man, your head is too big. Your stomach sticking out? What’s the matter with you? So everyone’s got that. So you’re trying to show that a little bit. And show how it bumps up against the next person, man or woman, right? Because we all have imperfections. And we work really, really hard to hide. When you peel that back just a little bit, not a lot. Because you know, the mistake that a lot of writers make, they just go like walk up and they just showed us. And that’s no good. It’s like, it doesn’t even feel real. But when you just like, you know, you just look oh, wait a minute. So that’s kind of where, I kind of worked with these characters, you know, in a small town. Everything is copacetic right. It’s not really the Andy Griffith Show. People are cutting deals and I covered a small town I was reporting my one of my first jobs in journalism was covering a small town. And these guys were like, and they were all guys. Rough men. Didn’t even like each other. If you know enough, you have enough miles on the odometer, you can find things you can find hooks to hang your story on to make characters connect. Right?

So wait, you said that the whole thing starts with this camp that you worked at? This wonderful guy who hired you? Right? But then, how do we get to Chicken Hill, who’s the first character who shows up after you decide this is the book that I need to start picking away at?

What happened was, you know, I’ve tried to write this book about the camp, several chapters. And the only chapter that was good, was the chapter about this theater owner, who opens his theater. And you know, he goes into debt. He’s trying to get the great Mickey cats to calm. Everything else sounded like it just read like Pulp Fiction. So I just got rid of it. I got rid of it. And I went, you know, I wanted to place it in Pottsville, which is in western PA near Pittsburgh, okay. But it was too far from where I live. And I just happened to, I was driving down the road and I saw a sign I said, Pottstown that’s what this is, you know, let me see what this Pottstown looks like. It’s not possible. And it was a beautiful town. So I started hanging around and asking questions, and there was a real Chicken Hill there. Okay. And then, and then I started asking more questions about, you know, there was a Jewish temple there. And then, you know, there was a fancy estate was and still is a fancy school, they’re a private school. And it used to be a manufacturing center with all these, you know, businesses of Bethlehem Steel and flag industries and all that’s gone. I said, Okay, let me place it here. And now I just got to inhabit this place with some characters, Pensgrove whatever, the state institution, mental institution is just the next town over.

Right. So everything’s within a really tight radius.

You have all your physical things there. And then it was about finding, you know, the right kinds of characters, right kinds of Jewish characters, right kinds of Black characters, you know, the Black characters are very varied in this book and the kinds of other townspeople who make up this story.

Alright, so when you’re sitting down though, and really committing to the idea of Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, right? Are you letting the characters drive? Or are you just walking through a bit of plot? And then you sort of piece it all together? Or is this just kind of sitting down and riffing until you have a thing?

If you ever hear the first like 20 bars of the song St. Thomas by Sonny Rollins, you know exactly what I did, because Sonny…

I actually do know that piece.

You listen to the first 20 bars of Sonny Rollins solo horn, I wish Heaven and Earth Grocery still had that kind of, doesn’t have that kind of brilliance. But what Sonny Rollins did was he has a little bit up and then he just grows up that one bit. And then he flies up and it comes back to it again. And then he goes, and he’s a pure improviser. That’s pure improv improvisation as opposed to these cats that the same thing, but in a different key. And what happened with Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was that Moshe’s relationship and his love with Chona was so powerful that I just pinged off it, pinged off it, and the circle grew wider. And then Addy and her husband, Nate, you know, they, their song began. So each character drove the plot deeper and deeper, there was always this idea of how are we going to get somebody in this institution, right, so that we can show how horrible it is and number two, how to get out of it, or how these kids in these institutions are forced to be with adults. So it was always about that. And really, Nate’s relationship with Dodo was kind of the crutch that pushed push the book in into, you know, the push the boat into the water and allowed it to move. It’s a character driven piece of work. And plot is always driven by character, when it’s done the other way around. It never works.

This would be a really different book, this would be a wildly different book. And I think, you know, again, you write with an incredible amount of heart. And you can feel the characters being themselves.

You are blowing me up, man.

I’m noodling around Deacon King Kong there’s some stuff from Deacon King Kong, and I’m trying not to bounce back to it, because we are talking about Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. But there is some stuff that you do where I’m just like, okay, anyone else I might raise an eyebrow, but I’m like, no, no, this is this is I just want to hear the rest of the story. I just want to hear the rest of the story. And there are some moments in Heaven and Earth, and certainly, you know, when we’re in the institution, there’s some there’s some stuff that made my eyes get really big, but I knew that you were gonna get me through to the other side. And that, yes, I would be changed as a reader on the other side, but I would get a very satisfying ending. Which, you know, I think we can say that without…

Well listen, I mean, as they say, and you know, the customer’s always right, but I mean, I look, I just want my dreams come true. But in a way that’s believable. And in a way that makes you know, look, the guy who ran that camp that I was saying, but he’s still there he lives in Florida. His name is Sy Friend, he’s, you know, I sent him the book as soon as I was finished. And that, you know, and when he said he liked it, it meant the world to me, that so you have to suspend your sense of belief when you drag yourself through the keyhole into the room of fiction? If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be doing it. Because it’s just too hard to do. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s just so hard to write novels. So, but when they go right, it’s this, there’s nothing like it. And at certain point, it seemed like this was going on, it was going right. I like to think that, you know, that spirit sometimes, you know, entered the room and got me through some of the more difficult sections, you know, did I think about my grandmother when I was writing it? And, and also wanted to kind of give a nod to early you know, early Jewish Americans from the early part of 20th century these union rabble rousers and socialists and all that stuff they did you know, they’re all no one even remembers that they are EL Doctorow does wrote about them in his books and Ragtime and in in other books as well. And other people have, you know, but I wanted to do it, you know, in you know, as Frank Sinatra said, my way, where I wanted to do it I wanted to do it.

You have been compared to Mark Twain more than once. I do want to poke at this for a second because I think your voice is very, very separate. And very James McBride. And even when you’re, you know, Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong and Heaven and Earth, they all sit on a continuum, right? Like you’re looking at America in a way that you remain hopeful, which I always find kinda I, you know, I’m not a cynical person, but there are times where I’m like, are we going to make it? And it seems to me that you’ve kind of decided that we are ultimately going to be okay, if we get out of our own way.

I mean, I’ve been around the world, I’d say, Americans are still the most fun. The most fun, we’ve had some difficult moments but in any other country? We’d probably be, you know, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to us. But I’m not, I’m not cynical about what has happened in this country. You know, you have these cycles of pain and suffering and everyone thinking that this dystopian future that awaits us, I don’t feel that way. You push ahead, you slog forward, and you keep a smile on your face somewhere where I just keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. If I felt like that wouldn’t write books. I mean, I don’t want to say you know, everything is rosy and cheeky, but if you allow that kind of darkness, the cloud you’re thinking you’re never gonna make it. You can’t, you know. I mean, these jazz musicians who wrote music, Art Tatum and Trane all these guys. They all faced enormous problems. Yiddish musicians, I love reading about them. They would complain and get not getting paid. And just like jazz, Tony Bennett. Never. I mean, Tony Bennett is a good example. Yeah, I met him one time, he was a wonderful guy, not because he was talented, but because it was just in him to spread, you know, spread something nice to people. That’s your job as a writer, and people pay to do it. Come on. Did I ever tell you about time I met Barack Obama.

Yes, of course. I want to hear that.

You know, I won the, I got awarded the National Medal of the Humanities. As I was sitting right next to Terry Gross. So anyway, I went up there, and he put the metal around. And then he held his hand out. And he said, I appreciate you. That’s all he said. I thought that was cool. Listen, we’re doing great. We got a really good president. And we’re doing great. And we’re gonna do great, you know, with me, let it be said, you know, we have a great president, very proud of him. I’m happy he’s president. I think Joe Biden is great, too old, blah, blah, blah, let them talk. Let the man do his job. If I have a car that I need fix, am I going to take some 30-year-old guy down the street, I’m gonna take a look guys been fixing cars, 50 years, let the man do his thing. So that’s where I stand on that.

Well, I also think that you have this incredible voice, though, you have this very distinctive, very sort of sharp eyed. But the funny is always there. And I think there are times where I’ve seen reviews where they kind of missed the point. And I know you don’t read your reviews. So you are much better suited on that front than I am because of course I read every single one. And there are times where I’m just like, the voice is what matters, right? Like, I know, I keep referencing the musicality of your prose and your dialogue and your character. Like it’s just the way all of these pieces come together.

I saw Bill Evans toward the end of his life. And man, I mean, he would sit there and he would play and then he would, he would just like, I don’t know, if he had a drug problem, he would just wait. And then when it was time to play again, he would. I mean, and I said, you know, I was telling my friend, my friend was there we met, if I could play like that, I would just, I would do anything to be able to express myself that way. Right? Because everything he did was so full of joy, even though when you saw him, he didn’t look joyful. Right? Every note he played was so full of beauty in just like watching sunflowers grow, just you know. And so I don’t care what other people think about, you know, what I do? I’m happy. I mean, you know, when, when I wrote The Color of Water, which is, you know, was my first book. And I remember, you know, the first interviews people were like, you know, how does it feel to be a tragic mulatto, but, you know, I never felt like that we were growing up. We weren’t a bunch of, you know, black kids staggering through life trying to decide whether, you know, chicken sandwiches or matzah balls. We were just happy. We just did that was and so I’ve never changed it. that way. And I’m surprised that people sometimes that people expect you to know what you really don’t know what to be how you really are, you know, the older you get, the more you become what you really are.

I’m hearing a little bit of your mom. I’m hearing some Ruth.

That could be, that could be.

I’m hearing a little bit of Ruth. And it might have been that I just recently revisited The Color of Water for the first time in a while. But you know, a million years ago, when that book first came out, your publisher did a little party more for you than your mom. But I remember your mom at that party and she made sure that we knew mom was at the party. It was awesome. She was great. You must remember this, but she got up and man, she made a speech, and she had every single one of us listening. And she was, was she even five foot tall.

No, she was maybe five foot tall.

It was wild and wonderful. And she was, wow, she was Ruth.

I don’t think she realized the kind of effect that she was having on people. I don’t think she realized, you know, kind of effect she had even on her own children. But I, you know, I will say this, that we you know, we do miss her greatly. But on the other hand, I’m glad that, you know, I’m glad she’s not here to see what this country has kind of gotten itself into. I feel bad that all these people who grew up in the 20s, 30s and 40s, sacrificed so much that we would allow some of these bums to run things now they would they would feel like, you know, they’ve wasted a lot of their time. So I you know, I mean, although things are going to be okay, we can’t forget, we are in the midst of a serious struggle. And librarians and school teachers, and people who love books, we’re the last line of reason and discourse, and so we have got to stand strong. So if my book makes you laugh, and it gives you joy then good, if you will need laughter and joy. There’s plenty of other good books by plenty other writers that you know, readers need to get with because it’s, you know, it’s time for us to really put our foot down and be who we are, which is to be strong. That mean, this is about strong people. Yeah, no weak characters in this book. They’re all they all have opinions. And they all try to express them as much as they can, however they can.

But again, that goes back to letting people who don’t always get to tell their stories tell their stories, right? Like that. Everyone here gets their turn. Okay, Pardon, pardon the choice of metaphor, but everyone here gets their turn at the mic. Every character gets their turn, and it may not be the longest solo, but everyone makes their point. And everyone, you can see how it all comes together. There is still a little bit of an edge, though. I mean, you were as optimistic as you are. And as hopeful as you are. You still have noticed where we are not meeting standards, as it were where we should aspire to be a little more.

I mean, listen, this whole, you know, this whole business of white Anglo Saxon Protestants who was so proud that they, you know, that they had the third cousin on the Mayflower. I mean, give me a break. I mean, you know, come on, what difference does it make, you know, you go to the ABC, whatever it is this thing, you know, the MJ 23, whatever this thing is where you go find your relatives and how many people I met you say, I’m related to George Washington, big deal. Are you helping the world now? If you’re not and get lost? I’m not interested in talking to you.

So what’s next? Have you started working on the next thing?

I’ve been poking around a little bit, you know, but no, I don’t have anything. You know, I’m working on a musical that I wrote 30 years ago. Yeah. It’s called Bobo’s it’s about a kid who wants an expensive pair of tennis shoes. I wrote with a guy from Philly named Ed Shockley. And, you know, back then we had no juice on Broadway. They didn’t care, you know. So I’m gonna see running up the flagpole and see what happens. So I’ve been rehearsing it and rewriting it, but I don’t have any new books on the horizon now, but it didn’t take doesn’t take me long to write a book. It takes time to research it. It’s the work. It’s the research. So I have a few things that I’m thinking about. But you know, I’m just not there yet.

How long did Good Lord Bird take to research?

Well, Good Lord Bird, if you go back. I did a book called Song Yet Sung, which was, I think that was my third book. While I was doing Song Yet Sung, I ran into the story of John Brennan. And that was, had to be back in 2002 or something like, a long time ago, what happened was, I really wanted to write about Abraham Lincoln and I ended up writing about Harriet Tubman. And then writing about Harriet Tubman. I learned about John Brennan and writing about him. So now I might you know, I might end up you know, I’m kind of intrigued with Chinatown. Yeah my end up in the Philippines who knows what’s in the news let you follow the song.

Or the spirit moves you however you want to describe it. Sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time. And there’s the idea there’s the thing sitting in front of you.

Look, don’t I have a great job?

I benefit from your great job. Are you kidding me?

That’s nice to say but I tell you I got the best job. I mean, you know, yeah, I can’t complain about that. I got the best.

So wait, Deacon King Kong, that actually took time to research?

Yeah, because not as much as Good Lord Bird or Grocery Store but it because Deacon King Kong had all sorts of business in it that was in New York in the 1960s. So you did have to go back? It had South Carolina and the medical profession and had art. Yes. And all that business and the theft of the art and Deacon King Kong was a bit like the problem of the water in town of Pottstown. In Heaven and Earth Grocery Store like that. You need something like that, you need some hope, you need some buoy, some lighthouses, you can float the boat around it. And that was lucky that the eye thing showed itself when I was doing Deacon King Kong and with the, with Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the whole business of Gus Pritzker, the town councilman? Yeah, having this problem with the water that’s tied to the synagogue. You know, they did this whole sneaky little bit where they were taking the wrong kind of what taking the water, they weren’t paying for it was a lifesaver. Really, the whole business of the the bullfrog in the mikvah was really just the lifesaver moment, you know?

Very funny. Sorry, yeah. Well, the frog was very funny. I mean, it sets off a whole chain of events. One tiny little frog.

Well, doesn’t take much, doesn’t take much, you know, you just need a little bit. Look, the smaller the story, the better it is.

Yes, yes, exactly. But the tinier the detail, the more you can, yeah, it’s yes. The smaller your story, the better it is.

Yeah, the smallest story. So, if you have a small thing that can say again, going back to that business of Sonny Rollins doing St. Thomas, finding something really small, and then just opening it up, and I mean, you know it when it’s just, you know, you make things be, you can pull the reader along that way.

Hey, speaking of music, I was really listening to the Process Volume One, while I was prepping for this interview, anything new coming? It’s been a while since you’ve done an album. I mean, I know you’ve been working with other people, and you’ve been writing music for a really long time.

What good is a song if you’ve got, if it’s not about anything? You know, there’s so many people write these songs, you know, they go, here’s this new song, it’s called, it’s called the brown coffee. And then you forget it and forget it. Just forget it. Five minutes past breakfast, I have to have something to write for, but it’s the right music. So I can’t really, although I write lots of pretty little melodies at my piano here. And I just got my piano tuned today. It was wonderful to see the guy has been tuning my piano for years. I don’t really have anything to write about, you know. I mean, the reason why Steely Dan was such a great band and made such a great band, Donald Fagan, at least the half that’s still alive. That’s something to write about. Man. They wrote about things that really counted. And so I can’t really write about any, I can’t really put any music together until I have. Well, actually, you know, I did a record two years ago, but I never released it because I just didn’t like it.

Okay, well, that’s fair. I mean, it’s yours to release or not, but you know, I had to ask that, sorry.

I appreciate you asking even though look, you know, these young guys play music so well, they don’t even need they don’t they don’t need me. I mean, they got you know, this so many good young players now.

But still, I mean, did you ever record anything with the band that you were touring with after Good Lord Bird? You guys were great.

Yeah, we recorded but we didn’t really do much with it. I mean, we didn’t you know, I’ve never had a like a Big-Time record deal. You know, I’ve done songs, write labels, you know. But I’ve never had the privilege of saying like, I want to take 50 grand and make a real record that has this and get this arranger, get that player. Never had that privilege. But then on the other hand, I write books for a living. What could be better than that? Listen, I’ve got to have things to say, Yeah, I need a wall to push against. And I don’t want to push against the same wall that we’re all pushing us now, which is basically trying to, you know, try and make sure that democracy survives. But in some ways, I’m what I’m trying to do with Heaven and Earth, and with Good Lord Bird as well, is to show the sacrifices that are necessary in order for us to live the life we leave, what, what I haven’t addressed in my work. So this whole business of climate change and destroying the world, which is, which is really something that it’s big, but it needs to be told small than how do you do that? You know, I’m thinking about it. But I don’t know how, you know how, I don’t know how to go about that.

You know, I think you just need to hear the voice. I think once you know who the character is, you can build from there. But yeah, I would read that. I would totally read that.

Listen, our acceptance of the norm, is what is that is at once our greatest, that’s our greatest enemy. We accept this new heat that we’re feeling, we accept the fact that arctic ice is melting and that the sea is rising, floods become a part of life. That’s really that’s really where the game should begin. We have to stop the acceptance of that and move and go backwards. But so that’s another conversation entirely. I do think though, the whole business of anti semitism, for example, is not new in this country. Right. And I’m glad that I had the opportunity to show how it worked in this book. And in a way that is not like, you know, it’s just like a turn off and lecturing and so forth.

But then we get Chona too, and she’s not having it. She is Chona. Oh, you’re not having she’s kind of a great example of how not to be stuck in a corner by the system.

Absolutely. I mean, listen, I loved her as a character. I admired greatly. I mean, you know, it was so beautiful to visit with her. I mean, yeah, I don’t want to tip my hand about what happens to her. But if it wasn’t for the book wouldn’t exist. As I said, when I broke this all down, I got back to Moshe at the top of the book, the moment Chona shows up, the book begins to, you know, the airplanes on the runway, the wheels come off the tarmac. As soon as she enters the book, you know, the movie starts to play, and there’s no stopping it at that point. And that’s really how kind of how the book was what happened, you know, and I like to think that, you know, that my mother and grandmother had something to do with the shaping of the character. But the truth is, after Chona became Chona, she became herself. Elements of, you know, she didn’t look like, you know, I see everything in black and white. So, you know, she didn’t, she didn’t have much she didn’t look like my mother or my grandmother, but she had that power. That a woman of that time, particularly a Jewish woman that time would have given that, you know, most of the Jewish women in a town would, you know, they would just, they were placid, they didn’t, they didn’t say anything, they just went, went along and so forth. They didn’t know what to keep from the old life and what to leave behind. But Chona wasn’t having any of that. Chona was a real American, and, and she could draw a fist up and swing back. And I like characters like that. I don’t want someone you know, we don’t need to go to a peace conference to have what we need. You know, let’s go ahead I mean, she was willing to fight which for what she wanted, which was what we all want.

She and Hetty from Deacon King Kong might share a little DNA.

Interesting. Yeah. I never thought of that.

But Hetty’s got a little bit of are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I mean, it just thinking about some stuff that happens early on, in Deacon King Kong and…

Well, Hetty was more, a little more cynical, though, then… So Chona’s a more world weary, a wider read person. She’s getting her information from the Jewish newspapers in New York and San Francisco and Emma Goldman, and all these people in these unions, these union socialists, railroad workers who come in in a store, she’s getting all that and she’s loving it. Hetty was living in that tight world in New York, where if you make one mistake, you end up in jail, and you have to watch everyone and her husband was not the man he should have been, Hetty was in some ways more deadly. Because if she you know, she got mad at she’d really come at you hard, but she’s a little more, I’d say more savvy, a little more wise.

It’s really fun to read.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I like spending time with these people.

Yeah. Do you miss Chicken Hill. I was thinking you might a little bit.

I do, I miss that I miss Malachi and Moshe’s friendships. I miss Chona, of course, I miss Nate’s you know, solidity and but you know, once you leave that place, that’s it, you can’t, you can’t go back, I’m sure some people do to a point. But I’m like, I feel more like Satchel Page. What’s the point in looking back, there’s always more stuff ahead, you know, new songs to write, new places to go and people to meet. So I miss it. But you know, there’s always a new garden to make, you know, it’s always seed. All you got to do is walk out your door and say hello to somebody, you know.

Hey, so of course, we’re bumping up against time because I knew that would happen. But you know, without giving too much away. And I know I hinted at this character before, but this kid Monkey Pants. I really love this character. And he is not like anyone I’ve met in a book in a really long time. And I just feel like we can talk a little bit more about him without totally giving stuff up. If you agree.

I mean, Monkey Pants is, you know, is a seminal character in the book because his courage and his humanity powers the book, and really helps save Dodo’s skin. And it’s I think it’s important that you have characters that don’t look like John Wayne and Bridgette Bardot whoever the hell, you know, Britney Spears and with all due respect, I mean, this is a kid who’s a convoluted, you know, has cerebral palsy, he’s, you know, and what they used to call cerebral palsy. So, but inside, he’s profoundly deep and smart and intelligent, and he managed to get, he manages great things. The lesson there is that children like this have so much to teach us. I mean, first of all their parents, this is a special heaven for their parents. The truth is their parents get special gifts that most of us who don’t have clinical disabled kids get because this these kinds of kids have so much to teach, particularly those of us who consider ourselves artists, they have so much to teach us. So Monkey Pants has a lot to show us and I was so glad to meet him and to get to know him on the page.

Thank you, Monkey Pants. And thank you, James McBride. It was so much fun. Thank you so much Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is out now. And yeah, if somehow you haven’t yet read the Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong, those are out in paperback.