Deacon King Kong - James McBride

James McBride only came to my attention in 2013 with his excellent novel of historical fiction called The Good Lord Bird, a novel set in the 1850s that included such figures as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, and others. Despite the seriousness of the times and the historical figures featured, McBride’s novel was often as funny as just about  anything I’ve read. McBride takes the same approach with 2020’s Deacon King Kong, a novel set in a black Brooklyn neighborhood in 1969. Looking back, it’s easy to see that those were simpler times, even in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty as this neighborhood is – but all of that was about to change. Organized crime was jumping into the drug trade with both feet, and drug dealers had staked their claim on the Deacon’s neighborhood corners.

 

Deacon King Kong (nicknamed that because the Five Ends Baptist Church deacon really, really loved the local moonshine called King Kong) one day decided he had seen enough of one particular drug dealer. The deacon, also known as Sportcoat because of the flashy jackets he liked to wear, knows the nineteen-year-old dealer well, having taught the boy in Sunday School for years and coached him on the housing project’s baseball team right up until the boy gave up baseball for dealing drugs. When Sportcoat finally has enough, he has enough, and one day he walks up to the corner controlled by his old friend Deems, pulls out a gun, and shoots the young man in the head.

 

No one in the neighborhood can believe what the old church deacon has done, much less explain it. Even more mysterious is that Sportcoat is still, more or less, going about his neighborhood business as if nothing has happened. Why isn’t he running for his life? Surely, everyone thinks, someone is going to get even with him for disrupting the drug trade like he did. It’s just a matter of time.

 

James McBride

But Deacon King Kong is less about one man taking the law into his own hands than it is about a neighborhood in transition. The neighborhood, once the home of Italian and Irish immigrants who worked the docks there, is now almost exclusively black. McBride, rather than having everything seen through the eyes of Sportcoat, uses several other characters to illustrate how one man’s decision impacts the entire community. In alternating chapters, the reader hears from Sportcoat and his best friend, “Sausage;” a soon-to-retire NYPD cop; a local Italian smuggler; a powerful drug boss; and a few others.

 

Bottom Line: Deacon King Kong, bloody and violent as it often is, can still be laugh-out-loud funny when McBride is describing everyday life in the neighborhood. Sportcoat, and those closest to him, are all old enough to have come up in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South, and all of them are somewhat scarred by those years. That experience still influences the way they deal with other races and with each other in 1969, but remarkably enough, that’s also the source of much of the humor on display in Deacon King Kong. There are some memorable characters here, and McBride tells their story well. Surprisingly – or not, I’m still not sure – most of the criticism I’ve heard about the book is coming from black readers who find the characters and their behavior embarrassing.