The plot is loosely structured around a mystery in a well and the rescue of Dodo, a 12-year-old orphan, who, 140 pages into the novel, is unjustly incarcerated in Pennhurst, an abusive mental institution. A wide-ranging cast of characters comes together to plan and execute Dodo’s escape. There’s Chona, an American-born Jew who suffered from polio as a child, and is now owner of the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Her husband, Moshe, a Romanian Jew, owns the local theatre and dance hall. He lets Chona run the grocery store even though, because she allows the Black and European immigrant residents of Chicken Hill to take out lines of credit that she never asks them to repay, it loses money. Addie, an African American who is devoted to Chona and helps run the store, is married to Nate Timblin, Moshe’s handyman at the theatre and a respected leader on Chicken Hill.
“…on the Hill, it was Nate Timblin’s opinion that counted…like most on the Hill, Nate claimed the South as his home, but unlike his fellow Hill residents, he never spoke of his past. That was a dark hole. He was a light turned off. But to the colored of the Hill, a light switched off did not mean it could not be switched back on. Anything could happen in this world, especially on the Hill.”
The crisp, rhythmic voice of this passage resonates throughout the novel. The prose shimmies and pops, and it’s no surprise that McBride is a musician as well as an author. Part of the pleasure of the novel is the texture of the writing and its pitch-perfect dialogue. This is a novel of abundance, with an expansiveness that reflects the messiness of life, of history. It also leads the story into many digressions and backstories as more and more characters are introduced. I found it difficult to keep track, and I confess I skimmed certain passages to keep closer to the main thread of the story. Every scene, though, is there for a reason. Small, seemingly inconsequential moments reverberate with significance later on.
The story takes place at a unique time and place, when the residents of Chicken Hill, Jews from Poland and Bulgaria, Romania, Germany and Lithuania, live side by side with African Americans who trace their roots to the South, and before that, the old country. Everyone scraps to survive, which is one reason why Moshe, along with his benevolent equanimity, opens his theater to the Black residents, where he books “the wonderful, wailing clarinet of Mickey Katz” beside a traditional Klezmer band.
McBride writes of a community struggling against economic hardship and the structures of oppression they were born into. Every day, injustice threads its way through their lives. Sometimes it violently erupts, as it does when Doc Roberts, who has been known to march with the Ku Klux Klan, encounters Chona on the floor of the grocery store. Or when The Son of Man roams freely through the halls of Pennhurst. For “an unjust parent will raise an unjust child who is a snare to righteousness.” But while McBride doesn’t avoid the hardships and prejudice in the lives of his characters, he does not reduce them to a preachy or didactic message. They are too fully alive and filled with agency, creativity, love and ideas.
As the inhabitants of Chicken Hill band together—Paper, Bernice, Fatty, Miggy and Moshe, Nate and Addie—they achieve, for a brief moment, the heroic; the world shifts just a little. And we, the readers, are made whole, an accounting and a bringing together. Before we get back to it. For there is still much work to be done.
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