James McBride’s compelling new novel Deacon King Kong feels like a sociological study merged with a heartbreaking and hopeful saga. His colorful cast of characters which include Sportcoat, Hot Sausage, Deems, Pudgy Fingers, Elephant, and Bean, provide poignant perspectives of African-Americans living in a NYC housing project in 1969. The novel entertains while illustrating the effects of persistent and systemic racism. Though many characters engage in ugly acts of violence, the story elicits empathy as we learn about each characters’ backstory and life circumstances.
In the first paragraph, seventy-one-year-old Cuffy Lamkin, known as Sportcoat, has shot nineteen-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemens, another Causeway Housing Project resident. Everyone in the Cause knows Sportcoat, a well-liked church deacon who is often drunk on King Kong, a homemade brew. They also know Deems, a talented young man who has been sucked into dealing drugs. But why did Sportcoat shoot Deems? It took me several chapters to discern McBride’s intent as the narrator’s tone initially seems unaffected and whimsical. Yet, soon, the book’s more profound aim becomes evident. Yes, levity and laughter grace these pages, but within a broader context of suffering and sorrow. The book delivers a compassionate account of the Cause residents, the local gangsters who control the drug trade, and the cynical police who lack understanding or power to change the situation.
As the narration unfolds, the history of Sportcoat and Deems and the other characters is revealed. The story speaks to their complicated lives of poverty, loss and alienation. Many residents, like Sportcoat, crack under stress. Others like Deems scratch out a living while their dreams diminish by the day. This unjust housing system allows people to live in wretched conditions. Fortunately, the presence of the Five Ways Church enables Cause residents moments of joy, love and connection. But drugs, liquor and violence haunt this housing project. The narrator states, “And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.” With cruel irony, the Cause residents glimpse views of the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
As more violence ensues, a crowd gathers to hear Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife, give an update. McBride’s fury is felt, “They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number were down -gone, changed forever, dead or not, it doesn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. 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, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still, New York blamed you for all its problems.”
Miraculously, Deacon King Kong ends with a modicum of hope and happiness. And while James McBride’s celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit, the novel is also a searing indictment of the persistent racism that unjustly torments our fellow citizens.
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