The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store v. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 20 • QUARTERFINALS
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
v. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Judged by Natashia Deón
Natashia Deón (she/her) is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee in Fiction, a practicing criminal attorney, and author of the critically acclaimed novels, GRACE and The Perishing. GRACE was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at Yale, UCLA, and Antioch University. Her personal essays have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, BuzzFeed News, and other places. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / natashiadeon.com
Did you call my name? Yes? Yes. So let me slowly stand from my kitchen chair, button the middle button of my bathrobe, smile, wave, and press a disingenuous hand to my chest. Me? You’re asking me to be a judge for the Tournament of Books?
Because yes! You can’t tell me this is not a divine appointment! Sure, I’m here to judge other people’s books and that sucks, and as a lawyer, too, I’ve turned down judgeships for the same reason, but this is harder.
In all seriousness, I love what former Tournament of Books arbiter, Jade Chang, once said: “Judging art is dumb. OK, judging art is complicated.”
I am a fan of great characters because great characters are the most masterful lies. I am a fan of strong narrators who boldly lead even when they don’t know where the heck they’re going—especially then. I am a fan of fast pacing built on conflict and revelation. I love language that reveals character and is unique to place and time. Finally, I am a fan of great titles and first lines.
In a world of fiction, where a story can do anything and our first lines are golden, it struck me as a lost opportunity.
When I read the title The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, I was ready to dig into a mind-blowing, insightful interior story about the little known life of an eternal Native American woman. At least, that’s what I felt the title was communicating. Yes!
For those of us who have spent any time in a US history class that included a scrubbed and “sanitized” version of Native American history—or, with Disney—Pocahontas and Sacajewea are two of the major women figures. Sacajewea was a Lemhi Shoshone teen when she helped lead white explorers—Lewis and Clark—on their expedition over thousands of miles to chart the Louisiana Territory.
I’ll admit I was initially disappointed when these Lost Journals began with the story of an observed white man—a lens through which Sacajewea’s story is almost always told. Who was she without them? In a world of fiction, where a story can do anything and our first lines are golden, it struck me as a lost opportunity, at the worst, but also made me hopeful that the retelling of this story would be powerful.
Here’s that opening line: “In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp.”
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store intrigued me because I didn’t know if it was a fantasy title or something else. So I opened the book cover, read the first paragraph of the inside flap—no, not fantasy—and then began the first sentence:
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.
Now, this opening made me sit up. The characters, the place and setting, a “happening” involving a skeleton in a well, a suspect, and a narrator with a voice that included “community language,” all in the first sentence. The voice of the narrator was one that immediately exercised authority and maybe bigotry, I thought. I wanted to know who was telling this story and why. And I also wondered if the characters were about to piss me off with some antisemitism. In other words, feelings were stirred from the start.
After reading these deftly written novels and looking back at these opening sentences, I found that they were making promises, were setting north stars, signaling what was to come—and both delivered. So what I leaned into to choose as the winner was a surprise.
I knew before reading The Lost Journals of Sacajewea that Lewis and Clark were selfish, abusive, and entitled men. I knew before reading it that Sacajewea’s family was murdered by a rival tribe, and she was captured and sold off to a Frenchman, and would later lead Lewis and Clark. As I hoped from the beginning, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is not merely a well-written recitation, but the powerful reimagined journals of Sacajewea in her poetic voice, through her eyes, with nuance and layers of spirituality that paint horror and tragedy.
As the reader I didn’t have to ask: Where are we?
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is multi-layered and unexpected. We begin in Chicken Hill, a neighborhood of "ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town's Blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn't afford any better lived.” It is a stirring and surprising novel that uses an alternating third-person subjective, what I’d call “a legion,” to make it feel as though the Black community of Chicken Hill exists and is speaking powerfully to the reader.
It also moves through time, and well-told time travel is hard to write. It’s similar to writing dinner parties—a lot of moving parts happening at the same time, and the writer has to keep readers tracking the action and conversation. What I admired about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was how it moved readers back through time seamlessly, 47 years from the opening. As the reader I didn’t have to ask: Where are we?
But it was about more than just feeling grounded when I chose which book to advance. I spent a lot of time thinking about the rendering of characters on the page. For me, authenticity and congruence are often crucial, especially in building characters whose lives may be otherwise unfamiliar, as with Sacajewea and her Appe (her father), and with The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’s diverse crowd of dancers, musicians, Hasidic Jews, coal miners, a great dancer named Malachi, or Miss Chona, proprietor of the grocery store. When I’m reading, I want to believe they all exist. And in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in particular, I was completely drawn in by Miss Chona’s love for all people and the community, the way she stood by her authentic self and in congruence with her beliefs, even against her own family (no spoilers intended).
In our world, which manages to find new ways to disappoint and divide us, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was, for me, a type of hope. It reminded me that even when communities are destroyed, they can be rebuilt across cultures—a nod to the novel’s first sentence—and it reminded me that reconciling the past is necessary, as are the tenets of mercy and justice, especially following murder. And when a community has nothing left to give—when people have moved away, have died, and time has passed—there is still divine mercy: “God wrapped His hands around Chicken Hill and wrung His last bit of justice out of that wretched place.”
Advancing:
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamed: Hello, Meave! To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of this judgment, so it’s an interesting one.
Meave Gallagher: Yeah. Judge Deón makes it pretty clear why she chose The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, but The Lost Journals of Sacajewea didn’t merit nearly as much discussion, though what she did say of it was mainly positive. Is it the hope she feels after finishing The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store that gave it the edge?
Alana: Sometimes it’s hard to put into words what works and doesn’t work in a book, but I wish there had been more discussion of how The Lost Journals of Sacajewea failed the criteria Judge Deón set forth: She likes great characters, strong narrators, fast pacing, and great opening lines. She seemed quite gripped by The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for the immediacy of the action and the clearly rendered setting it calls to mind—there’s definitely a lot going on. What did you make of her reaction to those first lines and how did it compare to your own?
Meave: As I’ve said, I loved The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, and I felt like its opening line was strong, just a different kind of strength. Still, things Judge Deón found appealing about the novel I liked, too: It reminded me of my parents’ stories of their childhoods in poor, diverse neighborhoods. I was the only gentile kid in elementary school whose vocabulary included, like, mishegoss—thanks, Ma.
Alana: There is some charm to the tale of Chicken Hill, as Judge Deón paints it: a little melting pot that reflects a shared “community language,” where God and hope persevere in the face of poverty and tragedy. I imagine many people relate to your experiences of being familiar with another culture through neighborhood osmosis. There’s certainly a lot of that growing up in New York City, and it’s a story Americans love to tell about themselves. I see how it’s compelling, especially in a time when people are reconsidering the whole national project.
Meave: Ouch! Easy for Ms. “We had people on the Mayflower” to incorporate the vocabulary of people whose predecessors’ naturalization papers are from the 20th century. I am (rightly!) chastened.
Alana: Ha! No shade—I think we all want to feel like we can connect with and understand a wide range of people, and that is a foundational American story. In some ways The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a solid complement to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, since they both tackle the American project. It does seem like whatever The Lost Journals of Sacajewea had to say about Americanness, it wasn't quite hitting with the judge.
Meave: Thank you for your beneficence. Our judge definitely preferred The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’s rather more aspirational story. Although I would like to know how Judge Deón thinks Hungarian-born Moshe’s desire to assimilate compares to Sacajewea’s forcible colonization. Ultimately Moshe is looking to gain cultural capital, where Sacajewea seems mainly to lose power.
Alana: Totally—and I do think that’s part of what she means when she says the first line, in focusing on the arrival of a white man, sets a north star.
Meave: Maybe it’s the loss of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea that’s making me more interrogatory about this decision. On that note, I wish Judge Deón had better defined the “authenticity”—what does that mean to her in regard to both books’ characters? How does someone in the 21st century judge the authenticity of stories about an early 19th-century Shoshone woman, or Black and Jewish people in the Delaware Valley in the 1920s and ’30s, both of which were also written by authors from a 21st-century vantage point?
Alana: The discussion of authenticity feels incomplete, which reminds me of those election-cycle reports in search of “real Americans.” I do think when she says, “I want to believe they all exist,” she’s speaking more to how fully rendered they are on the page, meaning depictions of their emotional interiority and quotidian experiences, than to lofty conceptions of “cultural authenticity.” The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a difficult book to judge in this way because while it displays these things, it’s also depicting a world we are much less familiar with. How much of our criteria for authenticity is simply a sense of relatability or confirmation of our own expectations?
Meave: Tricky question I do not feel qualified to answer! The Lost Journals gives Sacajewea a voice, but it’s mainly her internal narrative, with little insight into anyone else’s motivations besides what she understands them to be. It seems like the judge found Heaven & Earth’s larger cast of characters and multiplicity of perspectives more welcoming.
Alana: It certainly helps the story along to have multiple perspectives. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea doesn’t throw us into action as suddenly, and the judge expresses disappointment that Sacajewea must share the page with a white man. I thought that was an interesting reaction. Sacajewea is telling a colonization story. My first thought was, “Doesn’t this make sense as a start?” My second, “Does that reaction imply a lack of imagination on my part? A colonized mind?” She says, “I was ready to dig into a mind-blowing, insightful interior story about the little known life of an eternal Native American woman,” but this doesn’t quite land for her. I wonder if she wanted insight into the parts of Sacajewea that might be impossible to know—but not necessarily impossible to imagine.
Meave: I mean, I might argue that imagining a Shoshone woman’s narrative of encountering white people who will destroy her home, take her far from it, and expect her to just know how to guide them through places she’s never been simply because she’s Indigenous is powerful, too; if white settlers had such a profound effect on her life, it seems reasonable that she would reflect on her experiences with them. But again: biased.
Alana: I’d buy that argument! It’s also true that McBride opens with a mystery and delivers something snappier and more familiar in form. We never have to ask “Where are we?” in the same way that we do with The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.
Meave: As previously noted, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea began as a poem, which definitely affects its structure and pacing, unlike The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, whose form, as you say, we Western audiences know very well. Still, I’m sure there are plenty of Heaven & Earth partisans who are celebrating this decision. And now let’s check in with Kevin again about zombie votes!
Kevin Guilfoile: I’m sorting through this wet box of loose Zombie ballots and can see that The Lost Journals of Sacajawea does not have the support it needs to advance to the Zombie Round. As of today, The Bee Sting and Chain-Gang All-Stars remain our tomb-escaping tomes.
Meave: Well, once again, congratulations to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which moves on to the semifinals! Coming up tomorrow, Dan Sinykin decides between The Guest by Emma Cline and Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt. See you then!
Today’s mascots
Archie and Oliver are cockapoo brothers from different litters living with their two dads (one of whom is Zach @itsonlyzach, a longtime commentariat member) in the Philadelphia area. At nine months and five months old, they made the decision that they were far too unruly and fabulous to be pinned down to a bookish photoshoot.
Archie, a blond Gemini, loves waking up at the crack of dawn, doing laps around the backyard, and smiling big as he licks your face. As a fan of making big messes, his favorite books from this Tournament were Big Swiss and Monstrilio.
Oliver, a sable with red highlights Libra, loves napping undisturbed for hours, slinking around like a cat, and stealing the remote control. As a sneaky observer, his favorite books from this Tournament were The Guest and Open Throat.
Though very good boys, both are passionate about disrupting their father’s efforts to get his book recommendation newsletter Boom ’Em Zach-O out a couple times a month.