THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE

Decades ago when a lot of groups of people of all types of ethnicities were immigrating to the United States, a Jewish lady named Chona ran the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. The city where they lived was becoming more and more populated with African Americans (and less and less populated with fellow Jews), so Chona’s husband (Moshe, a theater manager), wants to move uptown to where there are more Jews. Chona adamantly refuses to move, both because it makes more sense to just live upstairs the store instead of having a long commute, and because she sees their neighbors and friends.

 

“Chona, for her part, saw them not as Negroes but as neighbors with infinitely interesting lives: Oarlene, whose daughter had the longest case of hiccups Chona had ever seen. Larrell, the twelve-year-old who could not read but could do complex math in her head. And of course Bernice, who had been her next-door neighbor and best friend when they were children but who now rarely spoke and had many children” (31-32)

 

“America is here.”

 

A boy named Dodo was in an accident when he was just 9 years ago. The stove blew up in his house. His mother didn’t immediately die from the incident, but she died later. The incident damaged both Dodo’s eyes and ears. His eyes came back but not his ears. He doesn’t go to school since he can’t hear, so he may ormay not be dumb. The government wants to send him to Pennhurst (a nuthouse/ mental institution). To protect him, Chona hides him in his apartment, and Bernice agrees to let him sneak through his fence into her yard if he needs to hide. 

 

Chona suffers from a mystery illness. Some days, she can barely walk and has a fever. She visits multiple doctors, but they cannot diagnose what is wrong. She refuses to go to the local Doc, since he is part of the Ku Klux Klan. But one day, he walks into her apartment. And while she’s having a seizure, he attempts to rape her. Dodo oversees what he’s doing and knows enough (even though he’s young) that he’s invading her private areas, so he attacks Doc. Doc goes outside and gets the policemen, who then capture Dodo and take him to the mental institution. There, Dodo befriends Monkey Pants. Later, Nate and a couple other people from Chicken Hill try to break him out of the institution. Also, later the story gets twisted where Dodo was the one who attacked for no reason.

 

Chona later dies. Then much later, a skeleton (Dodo's?) is found within the walls of a house, but a hurricane hits and wipes away the crime scene before an investigation can be conducted.