Deacon King Kong

“As the weather-beaten Staten Island Ferry eased across the harbor, Sister Gee stood on the deck, glancing at the Cause Houses disappearing in the distance, and at the Statue of Liberty floating by on the right, then mused as a seagull rode the wind near her, skimming the water at eye level, gliding effortlessly alongside the deck before pulling away and rising.” James McBride, “Deacon King Kong” (2020)

The tragicomic novel, recommended to me by high school classmate Gaard Murphy Logan, begins in a South Brooklyn housing project reminiscent of the author’s childhood home, documented in James McBride’s 1995 memoir “The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.” McBride's father was a Black minister, his mother a Polish immigrant. On a cloudy afternoon in September of 1969, Sportcoat, a drunken, superannuated Five Ends Baptist Church deacon, shoots 19-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemons, formerly the star pitcher on a team he’d coached. Throughout the book Sportcoat, also called Deacon King Kong, referring to the powerful home brew he favored, manages to elude inept Italian mobsters’ hitmen.

The Black and Puerto Rican residents of the Causeway Housing Projects, built originally for the families of Italian dock workers and located in sight of the Statue of Liberty (“a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane factory from the old country”), had little reason for hope; some found comfort in religion, others in artificial stimulants - or depressants. Here’s McBride’s description of Life in the Cause:

You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children.

Even so, as NPR reviewer declared, McBride, National Book Award winner for "The Good Lord Bird," "entertains us and show us both the beauty and ugliness of humanity.” He describes the Cause residents compassionately as flawed but sympathetic, with common sense coping skills and apt nicknames such as Bum-Bum, Lightbulb, Soup, and Hot Sausage. Sportcoat describes a day’s drinking as going “from a toot to a tear to a wallbanger.” His friend Hot Sausage admonishes him, “Your cheese done fell off your cracker” and describes an aging beauty as one whom he wouldn’t throw out of bed for eating crackers. Until interrupted by a power failure, they argue about the best way of breaking mojos:

“Put a fork under your pillow and buckets of water around your kitchen.”

“Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it around your neck.”

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.”

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.”

“Step backward over a pole ten times.”

“Swallow three pebbles.”

“Never turn your head to the side when a horse is passing.”

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.”

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on the Thursday”

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times.”

Long after I’ve forgotten the plot devices of “Deacon King Kong,” I’ll remember the strength and motherwit of characters such as Sister Veronica Gee, who felt a bond with soon-to-retire honest Irish cop “Potts” Mullen; or Sportcoat himself (real name Cuffy Lampkin), who gardened for an ancient Italian lady he nicknamed Miss Four Pies and escorted her on hunts for pokeweed and other folk medicine remedies. Then there were the wonderful character sketches of residents such as Little Soup Lopez, who at age 14 switches from watching “Captain Kangaroo,” a “children’s show about a gentle white man whose gags with puppets and characters like Mr. Mouse and Mr. Green Jeans [once] delighted him” to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” about “a gentle white man with better puppets.”