Biography (website: jamesmcbride.com)
James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States.
His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a 2008 film by Oscar-winning writer and director Spike Lee, with a script written by McBride.
His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a Showtime limited series in fall 2020 starring Ethan Hawke.
McBride has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post, and his work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times.
Biography (website: jamesmcbride.com)
A noted musician and composer, McBride has toured as a saxophonist sideman with jazz legend Jimmy Scott, among other musicians. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, Gary Burton, and even for the PBS television character “Barney.” (He did not write the “I Love You” song for Barney, but he wishes he did.)
He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical Bobos, co-written with playwright Ed Shockley.
His 2003 Riffin’ and Pontificatin’ musical tour was filmed for a nationally televised Comcast documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He often does his public readings accompanied by a band.
Biography (website: jamesmcbride.com)
In addition to being an author and a musician, McBride has other attributes. He admits to being the worst dancer in the history of African Americana, bar none (he claims he should be legally barred from dancing at any event he attends). And when he takes off his hat, fleas fly out. Little things, little talents.
A native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools, McBride studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Master’s degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
In 2015, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America.”
He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is divorced, with grown children.
He recently discovered John Le Carre—famous mystery writer
He lives in a small city in central NJ in a brick house that used to be a grocery store.
Publications
Heaven and Earth Grocery Store: A Novel (2023)
It won the Kirkus Prize for fiction, reviewers are speculating on a Pulitzer
Deacon King Kong (2020)
The Good Lord Bird: A Novel (2020) (TV Tie-in)
Five-Carat Soul (2017)
The Good Lord Bird: A Novel (2013) (National Book Award Winner, about abolitionist John Brown)
Trenchblight: Innocence and Absolution (2014)
Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
Song Yet Sung: A Novel (2008)
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (2006]
The McBride Family Cookbook (2023)
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (2016)
Genre
The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel. New York Times (8/6/2023)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the latest novel from the best-selling, National Book Award-winning author James McBride, moves with the precision, magnitude and necessary messiness of some of Gego’s most inspired structures.
Note: reference to Gego:
Artist exhibition at the Guggenheim
"The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships."
Gego—from the Guggenheim
Gego, or Gertrud Goldschmidt (b. 1912, Hamburg; d. 1994, Caracas), first trained as an architect and engineer at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart (now Universität Stuttgart).
Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939, she immigrated to Venezuela, where she settled permanently, fully embarking on an artistic career in the 1950s that would span more than four decades.
In two- and three-dimensional works across a variety of mediums, Gego explored the relationship between line, space, and volume. Her practice in the related fields of architecture, design, and teaching complemented those investigations.
Genre
PBS podcast:
In his new book, award-winning author James McBride pairs a page-turning murder mystery set in Pottstown, PA with a powerful story of compassion, community and love.
McBride says the inspiration for the book came from the difficult life of his Orthodox Jewish grandmother, who he never knew.
The Color of Water is the story of his white Jewish mother, Ruth. Ostracized by her family for marrying a Black man, she converted to Christianity and raised her 12 Black children in New York, much of the time on her own. Died in 1942
She was an immigrant from Poland. And she had a very unhappy marriage. And I wanted my grandmother to be — to have a wonderful life. I wanted her to be loved. So I wrote a book in which she was loved, and I made her loved.
So this became a kind of alternate life of a grandmother that — who you didn't really know?—Through fiction. Through fiction, yes, yes. Fiction is magical that way. Fiction allows your dreams to come true. (source PBS News Hour).
Cast of characters
Moshe Ludlow—Jewish manager of the All-American Dance Hall and Theater in Pottstown; Chona’s husband
Chona (also called Miss Chona)—Jewish woman crippled by polio, married to Moshe, runs the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, takes in Dodo
“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. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.”
Yakov Flohr (nickname: Reb)--Chona’s father who started the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store; was also first rabbi of Ahavat Achim shul. Karl Feldman became rabbi after.
Dodo (also known as Nate Love II)--a deaf 10-year-old orphan boy injured in an accident involving an exploding stove when he was nine; can see again after a period of lost sight; reads lips. Thelma was Dodo's mother, and Addie's sister, so Dodo is Nate and Addie's nephew. His story is completed in the Epilogue.
Cast of characters
Bernice Davis– Chona's next door neighbor, a "Negro" childhood friend with at least 8 children; although she and Chona hadn't spoken in years, she agreed to "hide" Dodo among her children. Known otherwise for being mean and disagreeable; works as a cook for the Skrupskelis brothers. Fatty's sister.
Malachi—owner of the town bakery, believes his challah bread will cure Chona; he's not a good baker, but he is a good dancer. He's the one police talk to when the bones are found.
Monkey Pants— 11 or 12 year old white boy with cerebral palsy at Pennhurst who couldn't talk and "looked as if he had tied himself up in knots and was hiding from himself." He befriended Dodo, and defended him when Son of Man, caretaker at Pennhurst, attempted to assault Dodo. The Epilogue ends with "Thank you, Monkey Pants."
Cast of characters
Isaac--Moshe's cousin in Philadelphia who also runs theaters, but is far more successful than Moshe. Moshe borrows money from him often. Marv Skrupskelis visits him to arrange for Dodo's release.
Rabbi Karl Feldman (nicknames: Fertzel, Frabbi)—the fumbling, but well-meaning leader of the Jewish congregation of Pottstown.
Irv and Marv Skrupskelis--identical twins who run the local shoe store; known for being mean and disagreeable, although they made beautiful shoes for Chona
Doc Roberts (real name: Earl Roberts)—the town's well-connected physician, a bookworm with a limp from polio, who was a head marcher in the town's annual Ku Klux Klan parade; attempted to assault Chona when she passed out in the store when he came to take Dodo; his are the bones found at the bottom of the well.
Cast of characters
Addie Townsend Timblin—Nate's wife, hired to help at The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and for Sabbath chores; good friend to Chona
Nate Timblin (Nate Love)—Addie's husband, worker at Moshe’s theater
Fatty Davis (real name: Lloyd)—a muscular, gold-toothed man who ran Chicken Hill's only speakeasy; Bernice's brother
Thelma—Dodo's mother who died; Addie's sister
Big Soap (real name: Enzo Carissimmi)—a large and gentle Italian from one of the few white families living on the Hill; a friend of Fatty Davis, who translated for him and worked at local plants with him
Carl Boydkins "the man from the state" looking for Dodo; Doc Roberts's distant cousin, who was an athletic ladies' man
Paper—Patty Millison, a laundress and the local gossip
Videos
YouTube--Free Library of Philadelphia
YouTube—Amanpour and Company
PBS News Hour
Interviews—quotes
PBS NewsHour:
If you're a writer and you're writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are.
Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries, so — to make your story go. So I look at it from that point of view and also from the point of view that cynicism is like — cynicism in a story is toxic. You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to them push past their boundaries.
An openness to who they are, because they will lead you into a story that shows you good stuff.
And so I'm trying to get these characters to move to show readers, in a way that's not boring, that this history is important. Someone came here before you. And, believe me, it's going to be OK. Watch what he or she did.
Interviews—quotes
PBS NewsHour:
Like, I remember, one time in the subway, and somebody went at her calling her N-lover and all this crap. And we got off the train. And, later on I said — "Ma, why do you — you can't let people talk to you like that."
She said: "Their names can't hurt me. I'm happy. I just — what — did you do your homework? Where is your homework?"
She didn't care. She already — her world was good. Self-definition is the first step towards self-control and peace. Now, that journey is difficult, I agree. And I have been through it. But, ultimately, the best way to be happy in that regard is to just appreciate everyone for who they are.
Questions for discussion
This novel includes a mystery; it begins with discovery of the bones, the mezuzah, and some red fabric, down the well. And it ends with the events that brought on Doc's fall. But it's not a mystery that follows the typical characteristics of the genre.
Or does it? Does it have any of the genre's usual narrative techniques?
By the way, one reviewer called it an "epic" novel. Could it also be considered "historical"?
Questions for discussion
What is McBride's forte as a novelist—plot, character development, theme, something else?
Questions for discussion
What is McBride's forte as a novelist—plot, character development, theme, something else?
If his forte is primarily character development, how does he do it?
Questions for discussion
How would you describe communication and interpersonal relationships among the Jews, whites (immigrants from across Europe), and Blacks (from both the North and the South) living in Chicken Hill.
Questions for discussion
When Chona dies, McBride includes the following passage:
The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more.
They moved slowly, 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, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the 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 forebears who had made their lives so easy.
Questions for discussion
When Chona dies, McBride includes the following passage:
The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs . . . for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.
What do you make of this passage?
Questions for discussion
Both Chona and Doc Roberts walk with a limp because they have had polio. Is linking them significant?
Breakout room question
There are a number of themes in this novel—race, ethnicity, religion, disability. What does the novel say about these topics?
Next Week
"women of a certain age"