James McBride On Community, Book Bans and His New Novel

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: The power of love and community, as we’ve just have been talking about, in the face of tragedy can never be underestimated. Now, our next guest is exploring this hope and humanity in his new novel. He is James McBride. He’s one of President Obama and Oprah’s recommended authors. And he’s now releasing “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.” He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss why love triumphs over evil.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, James McBride, welcome to the show

JAMES MCBRIDE, AUTHOR, “THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE”: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: You know, you’ve said in the past that there’s a lot of pressure on the first sentence of a novel. So, let me read you the really beautiful rolling first sentence of your new novel. You write, there was an old Jew who lived on the site of the old synagogue, on Chicken Hill in the Town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. And when the Pennsylvania state troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of the old well off Hay (ph) Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went to. Tell us about that sentence, and why you used it to set up this complex but beautiful novel?

MCBRIDE: Well, that sentence really came at I wrote the very beginning of the book, after the book was essentially done. And I’m always big on these first sentences, you know. When Harper Lee wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I think — when he was 12, my brother, Jim, broke his arm or something like that. Edgar Allan Poe, you know, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I was sick, sick onto that death with that great agony. The first sentence is — it’s very impactful. The reader has to decide, he or she is in the library or in the bookstore, and they’re looking at it, they have to decide whether this story is going to be strong enough to draw them in. And of course, the book begins and pushes into a great deal of Jewish life during that period, that many people don’t pay attention to, and I wanted to draw the attention to that as well. So, it just seemed like a good place to start. You have the conflict that begins right there, you know.

ISAACSON: Yes. It begins right there, and it’s a conflict that involves many strands of communities, including blacks and Jews living together in this small community there. And in some ways, it harkens back to your own background. You had a black father, you had a white mother who you found out, I think, when you are a teenager was orthodox Jewish and then converted to Christianity. How much of your own background helps inform a novel like this?

MCBRIDE: Well, a lot. I mean, I was always interested in what Jews in early 20th century America, because my own — because when I wrote my first book, “The Color of Water,” I went to Suffolk, Virginia and researched the town where my mother grew up. And my mother’s family had — they were an orthodox Jewish family. They had a grocery store in the black section of town. And I recall, you know, interviewing a lot of the residents from that town who remembered her, remembered her family and remembered her parents and my grandmother in particular. And I was struck by the business of, you know, how much antisemitism existed in the south during that time. And I was a young man at the time. I just didn’t believe it. I just found it to be incredible. You know, I mean, they were white people. What was — you know, so I thought there was — I couldn’t see what the rub was. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand how difficult their journey was, and I’ve come to understand antisemitism never really went away.

ISAACSON: You know, you got a great character in the book, Chona. And I assume it’s pretty much based on your grandmother. Is that right?

MCBRIDE: Pretty much. I mean, she was — she inspired it. You know, my grandmother was — she had polio. She lived in the south and her husband didn’t really love her and she didn’t have a lot of love in her life. So —

ISAACSON: And she was Jewish and she spoke Yiddish?

MCBRIDE: Oh, yes. She didn’t speak English, she spoke Yiddish, yes. My grandmother, you know, I never met her, lived a very difficult life. She was born in Poland. She came here as a young mother with my mother and my uncle.

ISAACSON: And Chona, in the book, is somewhat that way, right?

MCBRIDE: What Chona was — see, Chona was happy. And Chona was able to — she had a husband who loved her. And she was able to accept elements of American life that my grandmother never got to experience.

ISAACSON: And you say of Chona in the book, she had not an ounce of bitterness or shame. I think that’s your sentence. And you say something like, Chona was an American unlike Moshe, the other character. Explain what you meant by that?

MCBRIDE: Well, there was — now, I don’t want to insult people who are Jewish when they say, well, my grandmother, by God, you know. So, I’m just talking about my characters. That’s how — Jewish people across the world. But in this case, Chona being an American was not a greenhorn. My mother used to talk about the fact that she had — she was considered a green horn because she was new to America. She hadn’t been here. That some of the Jews in my mother’s life who had been here look down on Jews who came from Eastern Europe, and they were considered, you know, European and thus, green horns. So, Chona had already separated some of the old world ways and accepted some of the new world ways that most she had not yet adopted or adapted to.

ISAACSON: You know, there’s a character too in the book called Malachi, and I think that means messenger from God. You have Malachi say to Moshe in the book — or Malachi says to Moshe, we are integrating into our burning house. Your book is quite a bit about integration. What do you mean about the burning house part?

MCBRIDE: Well, I — you know, I lifted that straight from the lips of Martin Luther King, because I call it Malachi, some people call them Malachi (ph). But Malachi was — he did not like America and he wanted to return to Europe because he was an orthodox, a very orthodox Jewish person, who couldn’t accept the ways of America and he felt that by Jewish people from the new country — from the old country coming to America, adopting American ways, leaving behind their culture life, the Yiddish language and so forth, were integrating it to a house where materialism and greed would only lead to suffering. And so, he leaves. So, that’s what I meant there. And he happens to utter that when he’s looking at a group of black workers who were working and they’re talking about, I guess, the integration and American society.

ISAACSON: You know, you say that in the books, and you got it in “The Color of Water,” now in this new book, “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” and it shows the complexity of black and Jewish relations, which over the past, you know, few centuries has been complex. And yet, you make it seem like it can work when you’re thrown together. Explain that.

MARTIN: Look, when Louis Armstrong died, he was considered — he was music went around the world. And I remember reading Louis Armstrong story, well, really, there many are the many things written about him. And he said he never forgot the kindness of this Jewish family that he worked for when he was a kid in New Orleans. And that stayed with him. In my opinion, the kindness that they showed him, he let that into his soul and it came out in his music that one around the world. So, it’s real simple. If you — you decide, you know, that someone in your life is what you pay attention to. He could have said, oh, I remember this Jewish family I worked for, they were cool. But, you know, I mean, I had to make it. My music is about whatever. But he understood what was important. Until the end of his life, he was accessible to all people.

ISAACSON: And until the end of his life, he wore that Star of David that the Karnofsky family, you talked about, gave him. But one of the interesting things was they grew up in the same neighborhood, and that’s what happened New Orleans back them, around 1900, and it happens in your books, is that we’re all in the same neighborhood. Haven’t we started to self-sort and it’s going to make this more difficult?

MCBRIDE: Well, the answer to that has made it more difficult. Now, where the two integrations happen is in schools. And so, when you start separating the rich from the poor, no matter what color they are, the kind of community that you’re creating is the kind of community where creativity is dead. Because creativity happens when people who are different come together and realize their differences are the diesel fuel, if you will, or the electricity, that powers the motor. And if you’re smart enough, if you were raised right, you will respect these differences and celebrate them as your own, if you feel like it. Because that’s what makes this country great, is our creative operative impulses. And our creativity, is — it comes from community. And “Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” is really about community. And, you know, the thing about community that’s important to remember is that I make a mistake with my neighbor or if my neighbor makes a mistake with me, if one of us is big enough to say, oh, you know what, I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Off we go. Then there’s peace in the land. But if you have — if you are in your world and she’s in her world and he’s in her world, that kind of community doesn’t exist. That kind of the situation doesn’t exist that allow us the push and pull that we need in order to function correctly.

ISAACSON: So, how do we regain that sense of community? We self-sorted in schools, as you’ve said. Our neighborhoods, they’re no longer like the ones of Chicken Hill, where people are thrown together.

MARTIN: There’s a lot more integration that people really pay attention to. And in some ways, we’re not really paying attention to the young people. Some of it is our fault and not the fault of the internet. So, it does happen, we just don’t witness it. Remember, while “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” takes place in the ’30s and ’40s, the story is about what happened in the ’30s and ’40s, we’re not hearing those stories. We hear them occasionally when someone comes up with a book or a first-person narrative about what happened. I mean, that’s “The Color of Water” was, it was like someone’s — you know, my mother’s words about what her life was in this small Jewish town. And so, those stories were happening, we just weren’t documenting them.

ISAACSON: To what extent do you do historical research? I mean, I know you did it for the — you know, the story about your mother, but do you try to be a researcher when you write a novel?

ISAACSON: Oh, God. Oh, yes. I mean, my background was as a journalist. You know, I worked at the “Boston Globe” in “The Washington Post.” I mean, I had to. Yes. I did a– UI mean, most of — “Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” didn’t take long to write. I wrote it over the summer, really, but it took, you know, maybe 15 years to research. I mean, I started researching this book like in 2008. Before really, because I always wanted to write a book about this camp with disabled children that I worked at, and it didn’t work out. Instead, it became this book. But I spent years researching it. Really, for young writers and anyone who is really serious about writing, a lot of your work has to happen in libraries and historical societies and through interviews to get to that real meat of a story, because you only use 10 percent of what you come up with, most of the time.

ISAACSON: You’ve said in the dedication of your book that during your college summers, you work at — I think it’s called The Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children. First of all, there’s a deaf child in the book, a boy named Dodo. Tell me about him, and then let’s talk about that camp, because that seems important to this novel.

MCBRIDE: Well, Dodo really came from that Variety Club Camp experience. Dodo is a deaf child who completely loses hearing as a result of an accident, and he doesn’t want to go to school anymore because he can’t communicate that well. He just doesn’t like it. He’s, you know, a black child in the 1935, Pennsylvania. And his parents — his uncle and aunt who are taking care of him take him to this — to Chona and ask her to hide him from the state, because the state is trying to take him and put him in the Pennhurst, which is a mental institution. So, that’s the — that’s where the conflict that pushes the book — the narrative along. In real-life, when I was working at the Variety Club Camp for handicapped or disabled children, or so-called disabled children, I met many kids like Dodo. At Variety Club Camp, at the time, when I was there as a college student, I had kids from all walks of life, all walks of disabled life, wheelchairs, crutches, cerebral — what they called cerebral palsy, everything. And it was run by a man who was inspirational. His name was Sy Friend, and he was inspirational director of the camp. And so, I wanted to write a book about the camp, but I couldn’t. I ended up writing about this town. But —

ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Why couldn’t you write a book about the camp? What was so hard there?

MCBRIDE: Because every chapter I wrote sounded like a camp book. The kids get up. The great director comes and they love him. And that’s really what the camp, but the camp really wasn’t like that. It was really about equality. That’s where we really learn from the children. The children were the teachers there. And Sy, the director, was just a conduit of truth. That’s really what happened. I mean, we were all underworked — or overworked, underpaid, but these children, they had no barriers. And that’s important to mention. The children there, they were white, black, Jewish, catholic, Latino, they had no barriers. And you — I couldn’t write a book about it because it’s just impossible to show how love worked amongst these children.

ISAACSON: You quote Sy Friend, the director of that camp, teaching you about the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam. Explain that?

MCBRIDE: Well, it just means to make the world better. This is what you must to. And Sy never said those words to me. He just lived it.

ISAACSON: You know, but this concept of healing, this concept of Tikkun Olam, which is, you know, healing the world, that almost seems to be the mission of your novel, including your latest novel. Is that true?

MCBRIDE: Well, I didn’t write it that way. If it’s just — if that’s how it comes out, it’s just — that was God’s purpose for the book. I mean, you know, I want people to love each other, but I don’t want to say you should love each other. You know, you get out of the way of the story and you let the people, the characters heal the world. You let them show what’s possible. When you show people what’s possible, you’re not telling them what to do, you’re just showing them what’s possible. One of the things I miss about the book is that I don’t — I missed hearing Chona talk. I miss hearing Fatty yack away with his friends, Big Soap. I miss those people because they were people I like, even if I didn’t agree with what they said all the time.

ISAACSON: Are you worried about the spade of book bannings and that books like yours could even be vulnerable someday?

MCBRIDE: Let them ban the book. If they ban it, more people will come to it. You can’t stop freedom, real freedom. They can say all they want, you know, but at some point, the hate engine runs out of diesel fuel. I ain’t scared of none of that. It’s only — the truth is, you know, as they say, it will set you free. But the truth is, it takes a lot of engine to run the kind of hate machine everybody that is pushing against books. All you need is one librarian to pull a book out and slip into someone. And you can believe me, they’re slipping them books around. Librarians are the real — you want to talk about heroes? Those are the real heroes. No, I’m not worried about it. I mean, I don’t like it. But if this is what the war is, then let it wage, because in the long run, these books will find their place. Because you and I are talking about it, and even though lots of people are afraid to talk about it, we know what the battle is. So, I’m glad — listen, you have a cancer, let it come out. We need these books. These books need to be in place. And we will find a way to put them where they belong. So, if I’m on the banned book list, well, good. It’s only going to make more people come to it. Put me in that — I want to be on that side. Put my name in capital letters. I mean, let’s — it’s time to stop being so meek about all of this and just call it what it is. So, let it roll as it will.

ISAACSON: James McBride, thank you so much for joining us.

MCBRIDE: All right. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.