Deacon King Kong by James McBride

This book caught my attention for several reasons. It was mentioned in an end of year wrap-up in the New York Times as one of the best books of 2020. I made a note of it along with a few other titles from that article that seemed worth picking up when I had the opportunity. James McBride also wrote Good Lord Bird, a novel about John Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry that won the National Book Award in 2013. I didn’t read the novel but I enjoyed the television adaptation, which I saw last year, so I knew the guy could tell a good story. But maybe the most important reason I read the book is that a friend recommended it.

The story takes place in Brooklyn in 1969, specifically September 1969, that liminal year when the Mets were about to win the World Series, Neil Armstrong had strolled on the moon, and the world seemed to be changing in so many ways, both for good and for ill. The entire main action of the novel takes place in the span of about two weeks and in the space of about two square blocks centered on a housing project called, “Cause” (for Causeway), a little Baptist church called, “Five Ends”, and a dock and a boxcar that an Italian-American man named Elefante but known as “Elephant” uses to smuggle stolen goods.

Deacon King Kong is a 70-something year-old man. His real name is seldom used. Almost every character in the book is known primarily by a nickname. He’s called, “Deacon” because he’s a Deacon at the Five Ends church. He’s called “King Kong” on account of a home-brew liquor with that name that a friend of his makes and which Deacon drinks constantly and self-destructively. But he has another name, too; to his friends he’s “Sportcoat.”

The story is a complicated weave of several strands set off by two incidents that come up in the opening chapter. One incident is the death of Sportcoat’s wife, Hettie, who died two years prior without telling anyone where she stashed the money she was holding on behalf of the church’s Christmas Club. Sportcoat feels pressured to find the money or pay it back somehow. Throughout the novel he talks to the shade of his dead wife as she continues litigating the flaws of their marriage. And two, Sportcoat drunkenly shoots a nineteen year-old kid named Deems dealing heroin out of the courtyard of the project, despite the fact that by all accounts Sportcoat likes the kid. Sportcoat used to teach Deems at Sunday School and Deems was a talented pitcher on the Cause’s baseball team that Sportcoat coached and umpired for. Deems gets his ear injured but he soon returns to drug-dealing. A good part of the suspense of the book is figuring out why Sportcoat shot him, and whether and how Deems will make him pay for it.

The rest of the novel revolves around and expands off of these two incidents like the arms of a spiral galaxy. There’s an Irish cop named Potts who investigates the shooting. There’s a woman at the church, Sister Gee, who Potts comes to interview and then starts to fall for. The higher ups in the drug business figure the shooting might have to do with rival dealers attempting a takeover and they work the situation to their own ends. That complication pulls in the Elephant who has for decades avoided the drug trade while keeping his smuggling business going on the fringes of the larger organized crime world.

Although the present action is confined to the two weeks at the end of September, 1969, the story grows from roots planted 20 or so years earlier. At that time the projects belonged to a declining Italian neighborhood and many of the story’s older black characters were moving up to New York looking for better opportunity than what they left behind in Alabama and South Carolina. Some of the plot points inaugurated back then are just paying off now. Back in the 40s, the Elephant’s father, Guido Elefante, spent time in prison with an Irish gangster known as the Governor and the Governor asked Guido to hold something for him until he could get out of prison and retrieve it. Like Hettie’s Christmas Club money, Guido died before he could reveal the hiding place and now the Governor has come to the son, Elephant, to claim his property.

There are echoes and repetitions like this throughout the novel as different characters retell the same stories from their different points of views and their different incomplete recollections. Eventually all the shards add up like the panes in a stained glass window to make a convincing and satisfying ending. One mystery I thought I had figured out early on, I got right and was feeling smug about, but then McBride completely fooled me with a second plot twist that humbled me again and increased my respect for his skill.

In the meantime we’re presented with a rich collection of characters: people at the church, residents of the projects, the Elephant’s mother living in a little house nearby, a 104 year-old former church lady living out at a Senior Center and holding the keys to a lot of the novel’s puzzles. There’s a mix of races and ethnic identities: black, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Haitian and Dominican, suspicious of each other (as people are), and jostling for position as the neighborhood changes, but also dependent on each other and even fond of each other. There’s an unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of a gay character who provides a key piece of the plot. I appreciated that. By the end of the novel two romantic pairs come together across ethnic lines in a way that feels hopeful.

Don’t be put off by the first couple of chapters. I found the many characters and the multiple nicknames confusing. The tone was intended to be comic, I’m sure, but I found nobody to like and the whole milieu distasteful. Sportcoat is a serious drunk. Heroin-dealing out of the projects, organized crime, an unmotivated shooting, these aren’t subjects I want to spend much time in, even in fiction. And I had just come off of reading Henry James so the contrast was more of a shock then my aesthetic taste could handle. But the slapstick of the opening soon settles down. And the characters’ heart and humanity begin to come through. There’s enough bad-actors to give the story danger, but enough good souls to give the story compassion. It’s good stuff.

The detective story aspects, and the dialogue, made me think of Raymond Chandler. That’s high praise. And I mean the Raymond Chandler of his novels, which are very funny, not the dark Raymond Chandler of the noir movie versions. I also was reminded of Spike Lee’s, Do the Right Thing, as a portrait of a tightly-woven neighborhood and multiple distinctive characters crossing paths. And I thought of Quentin Tarantino, particularly Jackie Brown, in the way that in the right hands serious subject matter can be both comic, and violent, and heartfelt, and romantic, all at the same time, and both morally provocative and entertaining to boot.