Cover illustration by David Cooper for The Washington Post

When Nana Nkweit asked James McBride how much discovering his Jewish background impacted his latest novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, McBride said that he discovered himself becoming “much more sensitized to the events of World War II than ever before.” He stated that his mother had cousins who died in he Holocaust, and he mentioned that at first he wanted to write a novel about African American servicemen liberating a concentration camp during World War II, conducting extensive research. However, he says, “[I] came to the realization that I’m not qualified to write about the holocaust. It’s too much. It’s too great.” Even though The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store does not directly confront the Holocaust, it does trace the connections between the Jim Crow United States, and here I extend Jim Crow to the North, and Nazi Germany in important ways. I don’t want to focus on that today because that is a discussion for a much longer project. Rather, I want to look at a passage near the middle of the novel where Moshe, Nate, Addie, and others leave Chona’s hospital room when she passes away.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a third person narrtaion, delving into the various actions of different characters. It takes place, for the most part, in the 1930s, but in a few moments, the narration breaks this seal, projecting itself beyond the contemporaneous action and looking towards the future in a manner that links the past to the present and also exposes some of the dangers of our current moment. The passage in the hospital hallway does just this, moving from the group standing in the hallway as Moshe sobs beside his wife’s bed into the present, filled with constant communication and screens. The group gathered in the hallway represents America, the rich tapestry of the nation that Doc Roberts and others in the novel see as “contaminating” the populace and staging a takeover of the nation.

Doc Roberts and his ilk embody what McBride says about our lack of knowkedge in regard to history. He told Nkweit, “Too many Americans don’t know history, their own or anybody else’s. In that vacuous space, cultural and religious superiority is a disease that renders us helpless.” That history encompasses so much that factually counters the mythological narratives of the past that seek to place individuals like Doc Roberts at the top of the heap. Standing in the hallway, the group of Black and Jewish men and women, each in their own way, immigrants to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, look like “a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arriving from different lands.” Each contributes to the community, working together to make it better instead of leaving for “greener” pastures or jockeying for position in some imagined hierarchy.

Moshe and many of the characters in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store believe in the American Dream; they see it as a way to better themselves, their families, and their positions in the world, but while they believe in the dream, they cannot achieve it due to white supremacy and individuals like Doc Roberts. The travelers travel “through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more.” Moshe, Nate, Isaac, Big Soap, and others recognize the “laws,” the “rules,” put in place to keep them from achieving the dream, the “laws” that tell them to do one thing, and when they do that one thing, snatch the dream away from them.

These individuals traveled to capture the dream, to become part and parcel of the body politic, to become “accepted” citizens, but Doc Roberts and other denied them. “They moved slowly,” the narrators says, “like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them — Isaac, Nate, an dthe rest — into the future of American nothing.” They come seeking a future, a place to be themselves and live their lives, but that future in “the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing.” Their lives forgotten, turned into soundbites and nods to inclusion without any chance of real inclusion.

The promised dream, their history, gets “boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forbears who made their lives so easy.” History gets lost unless we tell it. It becomes invisible, tucked away in a dusty corner, covered in cobwebs, deteriorating until we decide to bring it into the light. It becomes, likes the “sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor,” nothing more that “tiny blots in an American future” that turns into a scrambled mass fed to “the populace on devices that would become” ubiquitous in our society.

We can know facts, but what good are facts without history? History is much more than mere facts, numbers, names, and dates. It’s an understanding of what occurred, what preceeded it, what happened during it, and its aftermath. It’s an understanding of individuals, what and who shaped them, what and who they shaped, and their legacies. We can easily, as the narrator points out, pull up facts on “devices that fit in one’s pocket,” but we need the means to interpret those facts, to look deeper than the mere facts, to see the people and the events as much more than facts.

When we think about the Holocaust, we know the fact that over six million Jews were murdered and millions of others as well. We know that number, yes, but do we know what led up to that number? Do we know individuals that that number contains? This semester, students in one of my courses were shocked to learn about the ghettos and the rise of Nazi Germany and the Final Solution. They always thought about everything merely in terms of the event, the mass murder of individuals. They did not question or think about the long process leading up to the Holocaust or even the aftermath, including the trauma of teh ancestors of victims and perpetrators alike.

The passage discussed above encapsulates a lot of this, calling upon us to think about history not as facts but as a whole, as individuals, as events, as cause and effect. Moshe and Isaac are Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, fleeing pogroms to find saftey and stability in the United States. Nate takes part in the Great Migration, moving from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, fleeing Jim Crow. Each looks back, farther than themselves, to “a home in Europe” and a far off coastline in Africa. Each embodies much more than themselves. They embody history, the present, and the future, and we must think about ourselves in this manner. As Frederick Douglass wrote in What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.