The People from Heaven

by John Sanford, Alan Wald (Introduction)

An extraordinary novel told partly in verse, The People from Heaven takes place in 1943, the year it was originally published, in Warrensburg, New York, where Eli Bishop, a white shopkeeper, initiates a reign of terror on the populace following his rape of America Smith, a black woman.

Genres: Fiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

John Sanford was an American screenwriter and author who wrote 24 books. He wrote half of his books after he was 80. Sanford was a member of the Communist Party with his screenwriter wife effectively ending their Hollywood career after they refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his wife died in 1989, Sanford devoted his writing to exploring their 50-year marriage. Sanford left three unpublished books.

Also published under pseudonym John B. Sanford and his birth name Julian L. Shapiro.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is sort of hard to classify because, while it prominently features the radical antiracist politics you might expect from a jewish member of the american communist party, it's also not realist at all, instead being written in a somewhat experimental modernist mode unlike most well know left wing novels of the time. so you have fragmentations in the narrative, and brief excursions into american history that inform what is going on in the 'plot'. it is much more dialogue heavy than i would have expected from his later books, and the dialogue feels very authentic to the remote airondack mountain town setting. props to the book finishing up with the black woman shooting the white oppressor character in the face and this being too radical for the communist party higher ups back in the day. here are some quotes:

"The two words sank to the floor of Hunter's stomach and grew cold, like submarine stones. He tried to look the woman in the face, but the ceiling of the world he stood in was too low, and, cramped, he could raise his eyes no higher than her shoulders: he could see a headless body flanked by a pair of hydrangeas that had been burned at the stake ; he could see the spikes of the iron fence, torn up to writhe like a dynamited right-of-way; he could see the church-bell, thrown clear like a hat in an accident, lying among a few blistered cans of kerosene. He could see, too, the privy among the lilacs, and he wept for the first time when he saw that the cabinet had been pulled away, that on the hill of dung and paper stood his pulpit, equipped as always with pitcher, glass, and Bible, but labelled now with a single word drawn in coal. The word was "men.""

"THE BLUE AND THE GRAY— AND THE BLACK
1863 A.D.
Dear Joe: By the time this letter reaches you (the paper's wrinkled, and the smears are mud, or blood, and I ask you to overlook the trifle that I use a pencil: a spent soldier's stifle is my desk outdoors here in the atomized rain), I'll be a spy. When the sun sets by the clock, I'll take off blue rags queerly faded to gray, and give away my Colt and my condemned carbine and wearing what I wore when I enlisted (rags), I'll be crawling between two pickets into Dixie.
If I'm lucky, I'll still be crawling at sunrise. If I'm not, I'll be a long time dying, and, dead, I'll be lying not in some frugal loaf of earth for quavering pilgrims to vault the bulge I make and sink salt flavoring to my skull—Jesus, no! I'll be taken apart inch by inch, like a snake, and when the last inch jerks for the last time, I'll be left to rot, and the devil-grass (please forgive me this blasphemy of names) will come to revel among a few forgotten bones."

"Bigelow Vroom stood cross-ankled against the newel-post of his stoop. On the steps alongside him sat Doc Slocum, Aben, Tom Quinn, and Dan Hunter. Hunter, from within, and Piper, from without, started for the gate at the same time, but Hunter reached it first, went through, and closed it behind him, saying nothing as he brushed past Piper on his way to help the woman recover her packages.
Piper's hand was shooting the gate-latch when Bigelow Vroom, still buttressing the post, spoke to him. "Don't open it, Jerry," he said.
The four words were not conversation: they were words, and they had been uttered, but they were all meaning, undressed of command, query, or warning; they were pure fact; they were a lock on the gate, and there was no key to that lock in any possible reply that Piper could have made, but he tried to fit one from the always-ready ring of talk."I want that boy of yours, Bigelow."
"So do I, Jerry, and I've got eight shots and then a gun-butt to keep him with."
"He used a knife on my Marvin!"
"And if the shots miss, and the gun comes apart, I'll still have another thirty years to brain you from behind some bush."
"He's a criminal!"
"And in thirty years, Jerry, I'll sure as hell find me that bush.""

[Samuel]

"The best thing he has ever written and in some ways the most important book of fiction published here in the last twenty years. His language is marvelous." -- William Carlos Williams

COPY available at NYPL.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

🖋️ I enjoyed this required reading for a college course I took.
📙Published in 1943.
✿▬✿✿▬✿

[Fred]

2006