COLUMN: James McBride’s fiction helps us recognize Pottstown truths

POTTSTOWN — Just two pages into James McBride’s new novel, “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” and its Pottstown bona fides are already well-established.

“Chicken Hill,” “Manatawny Creek,” “Hurricane Agnes,” “the Schuylkill” will all smack any Pottstown reader in the face with that jolt of authenticity, and trigger that sly “hey-I-know-that-place” feeling that curls your lips into an unexpected smile.

In fact, the only inauthentic name in that first, flash-forward chapter is “The Tucker School,” identified as “the immense gleaming private school seen through the dim window.”

But its description — “it sat proudly atop the hill behind wrought iron gates, with smooth lawns, tennis courts and shiny classroom buildings, a monstrous bastion of arrogant elegance, glowing like a phoenix above the ramshackle neighborhood of Chicken Hill” — leaves little doubt in the mind’s eye of any longtime Pottstown resident.

I don’t read novels as much as I used to, sticking with non-fiction history, for the most part, these days. My wife and sister have read prior James McBride novels and told me I would like them. If my reaction after reading “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” is any indication, they’re right, and I’m a big dummy for waiting so long.

Certainly, part of that enjoyment is reading about a place you know with a satisfying sense of familiarity-become-celebrity.

How many times have I sat around a Sly Fox Tasting Room picnic table with the Marches — former Mercury editor Nancy, and her husband Bill, a Pottstown native and former managing editor — and marveled at the tall tales to be told about Pottstown’s past? Including a fair number of antics in The Mercury newsroom, truth be told.

And now here comes James McBride, novelist extraordinaire, the man to whom President Obama awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America,” and says, “You know, you might be onto something here.”

All that real history that we share can make us forget that the telling of a largely made-up tale can hold truth.

Unquestionably, for Pottstown-area readers, these familiar places, correctly named and put in the proper context, will add to that aura of authenticity. Yes, some may quibble about things like the actual proximity of Manatawny Creek to Chicken Hill, but why bicker? It’s not like James McBride grew up in Pottstown!

Of course, reading about this half-fictional past can have you asking yourself, “Did these events really happen?”

For the record, I asked McBride during a recent interview and he cleared a few things up. Doc Roberts, the handsy doctor who triggers the cascade of tragedy that drives the story? Not based on anybody real.

The long-dead body in the well that the national media has fixated on as the stepping-off point for its coverage? “Absolutely false,” the author reports,  although to be fair, it is also the book’s stepping-off point, so can we blame them?

The fact that the town fathers resisted installing water and sewer pipes to “certain parts” of town until legendary Mercury founding editor Shandy Hill launched an editorial tirade? Mostly true.

But what feels more true to me are McBride’s characters. Some are irascible, difficult and reluctant to help. Some, frankly, aren’t so bright. They are anything but two-dimensional and are powerful tributes to the wealth of his imagination.

The “Chicken Hill” McBride describes is not a temple of saccharine camaraderie.

Their common religion does not mean all the Jews on James McBride’s “Chicken Hill” get along. The German Jews are snooty, the Romanian Jews are “crazy” and as for the Bulgarian Jews, as Moshe’s brother Isaac notes, “whenever they feel like working, they sit until the feeling passes.”

Equally disinclined to harmony are the Hill’s Black residents. Lured by famously good sweet potato pie, Miggy, a Gullah fortuneteller who works at Pennhurst —  a key plot through line — explains to Paper, the town gossip, why the Lowgods and Loves of Hemlock Row are different “from you all up on the hill.”

This is no Disney-ish paean to harmony; no scrappy talking pets offering comic relief; no catchy, uplifting musical score to tell us when everything’s going to be alright.

In fact, many of the things that happen in this novel are definitively not alright, and I was convinced until the end that things would not end well at all.

Nevertheless, everyone gets along as best they can, sometimes reluctantly tolerant of others not like them, and sometimes pushed into recognizing why they must do what’s right.

Central to this pushing is the character of Chona Ludlow, the Pottstown-born Jew of Bulgarian descent, hobbled by polio, who runs the perpetually-in-the-red neighborhood store and refuses to let anyone go hungry or to let racists get away with being racists, no matter their race, often simply by dint of her example. Even dead, she pushes them to stumble forward seeking justice.

One of my favorite passages in the book has to do with Fatty, an ex-con hustler who returns to “Chicken Hill” and runs a ramshackle neighborhood bar, sells hamburgers off a wagon and does anything else that might make him a buck. In being convinced to participate in what can only be described as a plumbing caper to help the Jewish Temple get fresh water, Fatty muses on the late Chona, trying to convince himself she was nothing special. But he eventually realizes, “Chona was one of them, she was the one among them who ruined his hate for them, and for that he resented her.”

This is not hearts and rainbows. This is not “It’s a Small World.” But it does feel true. Many of us do not let go of our prejudices easily. To steal a line from one of my father’s poems, we become used to our hurts, real and imagined, “wearing the scars like jewels sewn into the skin.”

His research and interviews convinced McBride that what many of us who live here have come to know. “Pottstown seems to be to be the kind of place where you can’t say ‘these people stink,’ because those are the same people who come and help you change a tire at two in the morning and drive you home.”

Pottstown, he said, “seems to be a place where people come and try to make it a place of community. It’s not easy work.”

You don’t get much truer than that. And sometimes you need a tall tale about the place you live to remember it.

Reporter Evan Brandt has covered Pottstown (among many other communities) for The Mercury for more than 25 years.