fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. DEACON KING KONG By James McBride It’s September 1969, and Deacon Cuffy Lambkin is about to become a dead man walking. Well, to be accurate, Sportcoat, as he is better known, is about to become more of a dead man walking. Having miraculously brushed off three strokes and a Job-like torrent of near fatal afflictions, Sportcoat has been pronounced dead more often than Michael Myers.
But this time things are looking terminal. On someone else this fate might be a crusher, but Sportcoat is the type of stubborn coot on whom doom roosts lightly, if at all. Besides, our hero has bigger worries than his own death foretold. The church Christmas fund his wife was safekeeping is missing, and certain members of the Five Ends Baptist Church of South Brooklyn are beginning to wonder whether ole Deacon Sportcoat might not be responsible.
Sportcoat is the vexatious heart of James McBride’s cracking new novel, “Deacon King Kong. ” With his porkpie hat and garish jackets, Sportcoat is a beloved fixture of the Causeway Houses (the Red Hook projects in Clark Kent glasses). A “wiry, laughing brown-skinned man who had coughed, wheezed, hacked, guffawed, and drank his way through the Cause Houses for a good part of his 71 years,” Sportcoat reads like something out of Zora Neale Hurston updated by Paul Beatty: a “walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen. ” The old man is also a sot who dedicates much of his free time (and most of his work time) to getting King Kong drunk on the local King Kong hooch.
But all that liquor hasn’t knocked Sportcoat out of the game; he still attends church, still has more odd jobs than fingers, still helps everyone with almost anything — he’s the neighborhood handyman and gardener, TaskRabbit and Radagast the Brown, all in one. Lately, however, life has started throwing Sportcoat some serious curves. The baseball team he’s so proud of has disbanded and his star player, Deems Clemens, has gone from the neighborhood’s No. 1 pitcher to its No.
1 plug, a “dreadful, poison-selling, murderous meathead with all the appeal of a Cyclops. ” Sportcoat’s relationship with his wife of 40 years, Hettie, has also cratered. Hettie, with her red wig and sharp tongue, is a lively presence, despite being two years dead, having drowned in the harbor under mysterious circumstances, in full view of the Statue of Liberty. Sportcoat alone can see Hettie, and her ghost laces into him mercilessly.
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She wants to argue about the cheese (long story), and he wants her help finding the missing Christmas money, but Madame Blavatsky, Sportcoat is not. To the residents of the Cause Houses, Sportcoat looks like he’s arguing with himself, which ain’t really a biggie — in the Cause Houses a little crazy isn’t unexpected. But what is unexpected is that on the eve of delivering his first guest sermon at Five Ends Baptist — a speech titled “Don’t Eat the Dressing Without Confessing” — Sportcoat shoots Deems Clemens’s ear clean off, and then appears to hump him in front of the whole project. Apropos of absolutely nothing.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of March. See the full list. ] The shooting and the humping not only mark Sportcoat for death, but they throw the Cause Houses into an uproar and set off an ill chain reaction among the various cliques that dominate the drug trade in South Brooklyn. In the wake of the shooting, crews start warring, assassins are dispatched (including a hit man “so horrible that everyone seemed afraid to mention his name”) and even the local mob capos mobilize.
An aging white detective tries to find Sportcoat before anyone else does, but the community, led by the handsome Sister Veronica Gee, ain’t trying to help no cop — and in that no-snitching stalemate, an unlikely interracial love begins to bloom. And if that weren’t incident enough, McBride’s got more: Elefante, the Italian smuggler whose men fished Hettie’s body out of the harbor, is approached by his father’s former cellmate, who claims that said pops hid away a World War II treasure worth millions. Elefante, old school in a world turning feral, and dreaming of a wife he never found, decides that this treasure might be his way out of Brooklyn. So Elefante hunts the treasure; the drug dealers hunt each other; and everybody, including the lovestruck detective and the hit-man-who-cannot-be-named, hunts Sportcoat.
And Sportcoat? He visits his friends Rufus and Hot Sausage. He argues with ghost Hettie over the Christmas money. He attends to his odd jobs.
And, of course, he drinks. He can’t remember shooting or humping Deems, refuses to believe he would do anything that nuts. Sportcoat’s terrified friends keep trying to convince him that he’s in a crime story of the worst kind, but Sportcoat steadfastly refuses to play along.
“(Sportcoat makes Bartleby seem accommodating.”
) All he wants is to find the Christmas fund money and maybe pull the old baseball team together for one last run. “Deacon King Kong” is many things: a mystery novel, a crime novel, an urban farce, a portrait of a project community. There’s even some western in here. The novel is, in other words, a lot.
Fortunately, it is also deeply felt, beautifully written and profoundly humane; McBride’s ability to inhabit his characters’ foibled, all-too-human interiority helps transform a fine book into a great one. He has written beautifully before, in his beloved memoir, “The Color of Water,” and, with terrifying irreverence, in his National Book Award-winning novel, “The Good Lord Bird. ” But “Deacon King Kong” reads like he’s tapped a whole fresh seam of inspiration and verve. It’s clear that he’s having a blast, and his spirit of funning irreverence supercharges the entire narrative like home-brewed black lightning.
McBride’s got jokes like Ali Wong’s got jokes. Like your colmado’s got jokes. I made the mistake of reading “Deacon King Kong” on the Tokyo subway and my nonstop chortling made me no friends. But just because McBride is playing doesn’t mean he’s fooling around.
For all the laughs, he never loses sight of the terrible longitudinal harm that African diasporic and Latine peoples have suffered in the New World. He doesn’t just pivot from the humor to the agony; he seems to deploy both modes at once, and it speaks to his talents that he does so with dexterous aplomb. McBride will be cracking wise and without missing a beat he’ll hurl a thunderbolt whose clarifying rage could light up half a borough: “the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a Page 1 story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich — ‘West Side Story,’ ‘Porgy & Bess,’ ‘Purlie Victorious’ — and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color. ” “Deacon King Kong” brings to mind the scholar Glenda Carpio’s observation that “African-American humor has been, for centuries, a humor of survival.
It has been a safety valve, a mode of minimizing pain and defeat, as well as a medium capable of expressing grievance and grief in the most artful and incisive ways. It has been a way of asserting one’s humanity in the face of pulverization and mass murder. ” Turns out the good Deacon got it wrong: Our tale is an American Crime Story, just not the kind that is on TV or Broadway. Still, not everything in “Deacon King Kong” kills.
McBride undercooks a couple of his subplots, especially the druggy ones. The humor, for all its ontological merits, runs too broad in too many places. While Latines are a notable presence in the Cause Houses, McBride doesn’t give any of them real depth; his authorial sympathies focus almost entirely on the black-white binary, which is too bad. The one Haitian character brings a virus back from the island and has a thing for voodoo dolls.
I wish we’d gotten more of Sister Gee and Hettie. It’s clear that the everyday heroics of these women (and countless women like them) are all that keeps the hard world of the Cause Houses from coming apart altogether but at a cost to themselves that the book seems to hint at but never really address. And for a novel set in 1969, there’s not a lot of ’60s here at all. These deficiencies might have toppled a lesser book, but what McBride has wrought cannot be undone by even its worst flaws.
The novel is like Sportcoat himself — a fool, a wonder and just as invincible. “Deacon King Kong” ends like a Shakespeare comedy — to say more would give too much away — but after all the identities are sorted and all the conflicts balmed, we are left with a Sportcoat who has become less King Kong and more Deacon, and that feels right. But for all the good old-fashioned uplift the book pushes, the fact remains that there seems to be no real healing for what ails the Cause Houses or the city that created them or ultimately Sportcoat himself; no easy cure for what drove him to drink or led Hettie into the harbor on that fateful snowy night. Early on McBride writes that Sportcoat “never recovered from his mother’s death.
The ache in his heart grew to the size of a watermelon. ” One has to wonder, how big did the ache in Sportcoat’s heart become after he left his beloved South Carolina? After his wife, Hettie, drowned? How big was the ache in Hettie’s heart when she plunged into the harbor?
How big is the ache in all our hearts, we people of African descent who continue to endure what Achille Mbembe has called, in another context, an infinity of suffering? What lingers after the last page of this terrific novel is not laughter or thunderbolts or the endless resilience of communities of color but something far more unsettling: grief, like the sound of many waters, wide, dark, deep.
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