In James McBride’s first book, the memoir The Color of Water (1996), he wrote about finding out that his “light-skinned” mother, who had raised 12 Black children in a Brooklyn housing project, was actually the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His boisterous and touching new novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead, Aug. 8), introduces Jewish and Black characters living side by side in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s. The grocery store of the title, owned by Chona Ludlow, is where the two communities come together and where Chona cooks up a plan to hide Dodo, a young Black orphan, when his uncle tells her the state is trying to take him away. “The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy,” according to our starred review. I spoke to McBride recently via Zoom; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is the first time Jewish characters have played a large role in your fiction. Why now?

Why did the guy decide to climb Mount Everest? These books just show themselves when they want to. You know, I didn’t plan on writing about a grocery store. I planned on writing about a camp for handicapped kids in Montgomery Township, Pennsylvania, where I once worked, but that book was terrible. It read like pulp fiction—it was just awful—so I discarded it and asked myself, What am I trying to say? And who can say it for me? What I was trying to show was, you have to be really careful what you say, because people get really, really pissed off when you say the wrong thing, although I don’t care because I don’t do internet nonsense anyway. But when I was a kid, there was a Jewish sensibility of caring and humor that was part of New York life. Now that doesn’t mean that Italians weren’t that way, Blacks weren’t that way, blah blah blah, get over it. But there was a quality of caring and humor and humility to Jewish life, and there was a connectivity between that and Black America, in my opinion. And my experience at the camp epitomized that because the guy who ran it was a very Jewish guy, even though he wasn’t very religious.

How did you come to write about Pottstown, Pennsylvania?

When I realized this other novel was terrible, I knew I needed to set Moshe [Chona’s husband] in a town, and somehow the name Pottsville popped up, I can’t remember how. So I was driving that way and saw signs that said Pottstown, so I just drove there instead. It was a beautiful old Pennsylvania town, a lot of it still looks like it looked in the ’30s. It’s one of those many, many Pennsylvania towns that people walked away from after the manufacturers closed. So I just started hanging out there, did some research in the library at the Historical Society. And there’s a real Chicken Hill there.

You just happened on this place, and it just happened to have an area with the amazing name of Chicken Hill?

I’m telling you, when you go looking for the story, you just have to open yourself up to the idea that the story is in the air; you have to find it and let it find you. So anytime I start working on a new book, I travel around, I go to restaurants, I sit in McDonald’s—I don’t go to bars very often because they’re nothing but sports centers now. People watch TV, they don’t even talk. You go to historical societies and you talk to people—some of them don’t want to talk to you, some of them are just ridiculously provincial, and then others are really, really interesting people. You find out stuff, and then you start.

So what was it that you wanted to say?

If America was supposed to be a nation of immigrants, let’s show the immigrants…instead of pretending that in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, every small town was like a Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show. My mother’s small town where she grew up wasn’t like Mayberry, and her family were white people. For Black folks, it certainly wasn’t like Mayberry. And many of them couldn’t stand it, and that’s why they came to New York. [There’s] this fictionalization of the past as some great time when people were so happy, and girls were girls, and boys were boys, and men were men, and women cooked and they were just in their place. I mean, that’s Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, and they can kiss my ass. And I wish somebody would just start saying it. I’m sick of this fictional crap, this historical nonsense. Let’s face it: America wasn’t Mayberry. We had to stretch and pull and work hard to make this quilt come together. And a lot of people suffered and sacrificed so that we came together well and nicely, and if we don’t take care of it, then their struggles would be in vain.

A lot of the plot revolves around Dodo and how the state wants to take him away to put him in an institution. Can you tell us the history there?

Pottstown is right down the street from Pennhurst, which is a notorious state institution for “mentally ill” people. And these places were like zoos, like human zoos. A wife could get divorced from her husband, and he could say she had a nervous breakdown and put her in there. It’s not a stretch at all to think that the state would take this kid, because he was from the Black side of Pottstown, and you know, We want to keep them Black people quiet and we don’t want no trouble. I’m a state employee and we’ll just take care of it. It just so happened that this kid was in the wrong place for the state to take him, because this stubborn Jewish lady really cared about him. And that is what it boils down to. This woman happened to be the wrong person for the state to fool around with and so it backfired on them. These are the kinds of stories I get out of bed to create and to read.

The book opens in 1972, then it moves back 47 years, but there’s one spot where you kind of foreshadow the present, looking ahead to “a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered danger…that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.” Why did you decide to put that in?

Look, in every jazz solo there’s a place where you tell the audience, This is what I’m really saying. That was my Toni Morrison moment—you don’t want to tell people too much, and you don’t want to make them feel bad about being alive. On the other hand, I think it’s important for people to know the precious culture that many of these people left behind—and for good reason—that many jewels were left on the beach. And the question is, do you go back and get some of that polish? Or do you keep pushing ahead to where we are now, with the great-grandchildren of these hardworking, idealistic people ending up fighting over a computer game or cellphone? Did they work that hard so you could sit there and not vote and let some antisemitic son of a you-know-what claim this nation for his own? And if you’re a young person, you don’t pay attention to that, and then all the suffering people did in the past is no good. But you can’t say that to people because it turns them off. You have to figure out a way to make them take their medicine, to present truth and justice in a way that makes you feel good about doing it.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.