Fifty Books Project 2023

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

He could smell it, feel it coming, and it was big, whatever it was.  The Cause was changing, he could see the transformation everywhere. It was 1969; the New York Mets, once the laughingstock of Major League Baseball, would win the World Series in a week.  America had landed a man on the moon in July, and the Cause was falling apart.  1969.  I’m gonna call it, he thought bitterly.  This is the year the Cause falls to bits.  He could see the disintegration:  old black tenants who had come to New York from the South decades ago were retiring or moving out to Queens; the loveable old drunks, bums, shoplifters, prostitutes, low-level harmless habitual criminals who had once brought him laughs and even solace in his long days as a patrolman and detective, were going, going, and soon to be gone, moving away, dying, disappearing, locked up.   Young girls who had once waved at him had matured into unwed drug-addict mothers. A few had fallen into prostitution.  Kids who used to joke with him on the way home from school as he patrolled in his car, pulling out trombones from instrument cases and blasting horrible music at his cruiser as it rolled past while he laughed, had vanished – the city was cutting music from the schools someone said.  Kids who had once bragged about their baseball games had become sullen and silent, the baseball fields empty.  Just about every young kid who had once waved now walked the other way when his cruiser appeared.

Deacon King Kong is a darkly comic and romantic tale of life in a New York Housing project fifty years ago.  It is alternately grim and laugh-out-loud funny, looking back at some golden age that the reader understands may not have existed.  Its tone is generally nostalgic – which never yields realism.  However, McBride seems to want to grant the poor of this project the same gloss in looking back that the rest of America is allowed.  At the same time, as seen in the passage above, there is a consistently dark foreboding – we look back nostalgically at this time because it is ending and things are about to get much worse.

Deacon King Kong tells the story of Sportcoat, or Deacon Cuffy Lambkin – an alcoholic ne’er do well who lives in The Cause Houses (which are modelled very loosely on the Red Hook Houses that McBride grew up in and documented more realistically in his memoir The Color of Water) – as he attempts to reconcile with his late wife, help his church survive and redeem a local baseball phenom who has turned from pitching prospect to heroin dealer.  The key action, the event that the novel will rotate around takes place in the first paragraph:  Sportcoat’s shooting of Deems Clemens, the pitcher-turned-dealer, in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses.  Like much of the novel, this scene is comic:  Sportcoat is too drunk to shoot straight or remember shooting at all; the undercover cop who witnesses the shooting chooses to maintain his cover at the risk of Deems’ life, and – after shooting Deems in the ear – Sportcoat wrestles the wounded man to the ground in a move that simulates anal sex to those watching.  

Much of the comedy is that broad.  Sportcoat refuses to go into hiding because he doesn’t remember the shooting.  The police have trouble tracking down Sportcoat because he and his friend Hot Sausage have been using the same driver’s license on alternate weeks for years.  The hit man sent to get revenge on Sportcoat runs into a variety of Three-Stooges-like physical obstacles (he is hit by a flying brandy bottle and accidentally electrocuted, both injuries coming as he is about to get his man).  Sportcoat’s attempts to deal with the fallout of the shooting are repeatedly waylaid by his drinking.  

However, the final portrait is nuanced and loving rather than simply comic. Throughout the novel – starting in that first paragraph as he prepares to shoot Deems – Sportcoat is attempting to reconcile with his late wife Hettie, who committed suicide recently by walking into the harbor.  She appears to Sportcoat as a ghost and they continue arguments they have been having for thirty years.  The initial shooting is not simply comic.  For one thing, it is meant to redeem Deems, a former baseball phenom with a real shot at the pros, by stopping his shameful practice of dealing heroin.  It takes Sportcoat most of the novel to realize that he would rather see Deems dead than give up baseball for drugs – and that becomes a key realization in both their redemptions.  The shooting also interferes with the plan of one evil black drug lord to take over the territory of another evil white drug dealer – so it seems to stall the future that is bearing down on the Cause.  

Other characters are as romantic and lovingly portrayed as Sportcoat:  Potts, an honest white cop hoping to retire in a few weeks; The Elephant, a connected Italian gangster with a heart of gold, Hot Sausage, Sportcoat’s friend who works for the Housing Authority and is the only one who can keep electricity flowing in the dilapidated buildings; and Sister Gee, a key figure in the  the congregation of the Five Ways Church.  As I said, nicknames abound.  Sister Gee is the most well-developed female character.  Women in this world are the force of stability.  The Cause has survived until 1969, and will survive past the horrors to come, because these women will never give up and will survive.   In addition to the ramifications of the shooting, there is a subplot regarding recovery of a stolen art object – the Venus of Willendorf, an ancient fertility symbol that is actually in the museum of natural history in Vienna.

There is no one in this world who is purely good – everyone drinks too much or gambles too much or, paradoxically perhaps, prays too much for their own good.  However, there are a few characters who are purely evil.  The plot wanders over thirty years from the end of World War II to this moment when serious drugs are wreaking havoc in the old neighborhood.

McBride’s sympathy is for that old world – the black families that have roots in the South and the old Italians who have roots in the docks.  He casually portrays the wasteland left behind when the docks closed and destroys the notion that the north was some sort of promised land for African Americans coming up from Jim Crow without every getting specifically political.  This novel is a kind of comedic version of Clause Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land.  Everyone in The Cause is a hustler of some sort – working multiple jobs, often in a gray area between legal and illegal, but that hustling has allowed a kind of simple prosperity.  Everyone is poor, but there is little in the way of actual deprivation.  For example, here has been a monthly distribution of cheese – not the welfare cheese of later years, but of some kind of (unnamed) delicious, Italian, “White man’s” cheese – that has gone on for decades and while the plot reveals the original source of this bounty, the cheese should have stopped years ago and never has.  And there is plenty to drink.   Hot Sausage makes a bootleg whiskey known as King Kong and the book’s title is a reference to Sportcoat’s love of that drink.

However, there are dark forebodings everywhere.  Hard drugs have come to the Cause and with them the violence of drug dealers.  My understanding of the history of crime in NYC (admittedly incomplete) would suggest that the actual introduction of heroin to housing projects would have happened some 20 years earlier than 1969, but it is the before and after sense of a hinge moment that is important here.  The fiscal crisis is bearing down.  The old dock jobs are disappearing.  Crime is getting worse.  The Elephant is an old-time gangster – he stole without bothering anybody, refused to deal drugs, took care of his mother and avoided racial antagonisms.  The younger gangsters fighting for his territory are closer to psychopaths and their crews are fiercely competitive and violent (though sometimes comically so) while they threaten to chase church members from the valuable social real estate in the project’s central plaza.  

In the end, many of these old-timers decide that it is time to move on.  Sergeant Potts retires to Staten Island – and Sister Gee is last seen visiting him. The Elephant gets married and takes over a bagel bakery in the Bronx.  Deems returns to baseball. The church is saved.  Perhaps most importantly, Sportcoat realizes how much time he has wasted being drunk, sobers up and finally listens to his late wife, then  walks into the harbor to be with her.  This final act may seem like a suicide in my retelling, but in McBride’s hands it is a singular form of redemption, portrayed to make us realize what we lost as that generation passed on.

I have visited Red Hook and the Red Hook Houses regularly for years.  Few places in NY are better for seeing the results of deindustrialization as the rotting piers and warehouses are in many cases still rotting.  It is a neighborhood that was not given much time to recover from the crack epidemic before facing the ruinous forces of gentrification – with Hurricane Sandy coming in between.  There is great resilience there and the portrait of people hustling to do a little better than survive seems accurate.  The reality of the neighborhood may not be as funny as McBride has portrayed it, but even tough neighborhoods deserve the gloss of nostalgia now and then.