James McBride at the NBF: “Love is the greatest … novel ever written.”

James McBride, winner of the Library’s 2024 Prize for American Fiction, took the main stage at the National Book Festival last weekend, delighting a rapturous crowd with anecdotes and observations about his bestselling books and his remarkable writing career.

A Washington Post journalist early on, and a professional musician for years, McBride did not write his first book until his mid-30s — and that was the “The Color of Water,” a memoir that has sold millions of copies all over the world.

“I like people, I listen to people,” he said at Saturday’s event. “… and I happen to look to the kindness in people. And when you look to the kindness in people, you see their depth.”

He pulled a small notebook from a pocket to show he always carries one to jot down names, ideas and quotes he overhears in everyday conversation, which he then uses or approximates in his fiction.

“People are just handing me money when they talk,” he said.

It was that kind of wry remark, delivered with perfect comic timing, that delighted the audience through his nearly hourlong presentation. Smart, insightful and thoughtful, McBride got his biggest laughs when being down to earth. When asked by moderator Michel Martin of NPR how he was handling being the Fiction Prize winner and the festival’s marquee attraction, McBride — seated, with his legs crossed, on a raised stage in front of nearly 3,000 people — looked down and said, “Well, I wish I’d worn some longer socks so that people can’t see my ankles.”

A 66-year-old native New Yorker and a distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University, McBride went to New York City public schools, studied music composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and got his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University.

After an impressive music career — he composed songs for Anita Baker and toured as a saxophone player for jazz singer Jimmy Scott — the success of “Water” led him to pursue writing full time. He has written eight books, most of them fiction. “The Good Lord Bird,” winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, was a freewheeling retelling of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. His most recent novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” set in the Black section of a small Pennsylvania town in the 1930s, was awarded the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and named the 2023 Book of the Year by Barnes & Noble. His previous novel, “Deacon King Kong,” was an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2015 for “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America.”

His books have “have pierced through American psyche and culture,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, introducing him on Saturday. “He connects diverse people in his thought-provoking and poignant art, taking us on an emotional joyride in his stories.”

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is vintage McBride, telling a small-town story about people whose actions are sometimes questionable but whose humanity is not.

The narrative centers around a modest store run by a Jewish woman in the Black community called Chicken Hill on the outskirts of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s. Hardworking Black and Jewish people, ignored or insulted by the town’s white founders and leaders, get by as best they can.

Community life takes a turn when a 12-year-old orphaned, nearly deaf Black boy is blamed for assaulting a white doctor who is, as everyone knows, a leader in the local Ku Klux Klan. The child is sent to a horrific asylum for the mentally ill, drawing the cast of characters together.

The book grew from McBride’s teenage experiences working as a summer counselor at a camp for neuro-divergent children. He learned, he said on Saturday, that “disabled” people were actually marvelous observers of life around them, as nearly everyone discounted and ignored them.

“It changed my life,” he said of the experience, adding later: “If your job is to find the humanity in people, look to the differently abled.”

McBride, as he wrote about so poignantly in his now-classic memoir, was mostly raised by his mother, a Jewish woman who passed herself off as “light skinned” in their Black neighborhood. As a child, when he asked her what color God was, she replied, “the color of water,” giving the book its title and McBride his concept of universal acceptance.

“Love is the greatest,” he said in closing. “It’s the greatest novel ever written.”

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