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Synopsis:

The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.

Review:

Deacon King Kong is a novel set in Brooklyn, 1969. The Causeway Housing project is changing due to the introduction of heroin, and the biggest drug dealer in the projects, Deems Clemens is shot by one of the deacons of Five Ends Baptist Church, Cuffy Lambkin, also known as Sport Coat. Sport Coat is an old drunk who immediately forgets that he shot Deems, blowing off his ear. When people are coming after him for vengeance and justice, Sport Coat haphazardly navigates through the danger. Also with Deems shooting, rival drug factions see this as an opportunity to muscle into Deems territory. This one strange event opens up a huge plot to take over control of the heroin trade in the project. Deacon King Kong is part crime thriller, part comedy of errors, part social commentary, and completely a redemption story. 

All of the characters in Deacon King Kong are well constructed, but none of them are as entertaining and create as much empathy as Sport Coat. He is 71, lost his wife after she walked into the harbor, and has drank himself blind since. His favorite is King Kong, a homemade hooch that he drinks from basement to basement in the project houses. He has a few odd jobs that do not get in the way of his drinking, spends a great deal of time talking to his dead wife, and by the time he shoots Deems, he is so lost in booze and his grief that he does not understand why Deems would be mad because he was always so good to Deems. His blindness to the situation, and the way that he walks through the scenes oblivious to everything in the world besides where he is going to get his next bottle, makes me think of the phrase, “God takes care of babies, fools, and drunks.” God is taking care of Sport Coat throughout this novel, protecting him while he lives his life, walking through a tornado not seeing all of the problems swirling around him. 

Everything that James McBride writes wins awards and for good reason. If you are not interested in the stories that McBride tells, come for the writing. The way that he structures scenes and stories, the way that we understand the history of all of these characters and the neighborhood, makes me as the reader feel like I am sitting with McBride in the basement of a building on wooden crates, passing a bottle of booze back and forth, while McBride tells me the stories of the neighborhood, about what happened after the deacon of the church shot the local drug dealer. There are some lines in this novel that made me laugh out loud, but there are also parts, particularly about race relations, that really make me pause and think. There is poignant modern political and social commentary mixed in with a story set in the late sixties, and we can see that McBride is using this story not only as a funny and entertaining neighborhood crime story but as a vehicle to remind us that nothing much has changed in sixty years.