Jessica Chambers

“And here her eyes sparkled and she stood up straight, her beautiful face shining in the sunlight that glowed into the store window, the light bouncing off the fruit and vegetables and cascading into the corners of the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, illuminating the peppers and carrots, the Saltines and apple peelers, making life seem as full and new and fresh as the promise of Pennsylvania had once been for so many of those standing about who had come up from the South to the North, a land of supposed good, clean freedom, where a man could be a man and a woman could be a woman, instead of the reality where they now stood, a tight cluster of homes enclosed by the filth of factories that belched bitter smoke into a gray sky and tight yards filled with goats and chickens in a part of town no one wanted, in homes with no running water or bathrooms.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store