The award-winning novelist and memoirist returns with a tale of a Jewish and African American community that becomes the focus of a murder mystery.
There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew's house was the first place they went to. This was in June 1972, the day after a developer tore up the Hayes Street lot to make way for a new townhouse development.
We found a belt buckle and a pendant in the well, the cops said, and some old threads— from a red costume or jacket, that's what the lab shows.A mezuzah, the old man said.The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said. The inscription on the back says"Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World." It's in Hebrew. You speak Hebrew?I bang my head against it sometimes.
And you're Malachi the dancer, right? That's what they say around here. They say you're a great dancer.What about the mezuzah? It matches the one here. Wasn't this the Jewish temple?Who owns everything around here? the old man said. He nodded at the immense gleaming private school seen through the dim window. The Tucker School.
As for old Malachi, the cops never did find him. They come back for him after the hurricane business died away, but he was long gone. Left a sunflower or two in the yard and that's it. Old Mr. Malachi got off clean. He was the last of 'em. The last of the Jews round here. That fella was a wizard. He was something. He could dance, too ... Lord ... That man was magic ...From"The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store" by James McBride. Copyright © 2023 by James McBride.
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