Deacon King Kong

 Deacon King Kong

By James McBride

It doesn't take long to figure out the mystery embedded the title of this book. Spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with a giant gorilla. Rather, it is one of the many names given to Cuffy, Lambkin also known as Sportcoat, for his sartorial predilections, and Deacon King Kong, a nod both to his role at the Five Points church and to his other great predilection, a brand of moonshine called King Kong. Other mysteries in the book, though, take a bit more unraveling.

That includes the first: Why, on the day the 71-year-old is to delivery his first-ever sermon at the church around which his housing-project community revolves, did Sportcoat walk up to the most notorious drug dealer in the Cause projects and shoot him in broad daylight? And why, given his extraordinary and routine drunkeness, is it so hard for police and mafia alike to catch him in the wake of this brazen incident? 

And then there are more meta mysteries. Like: Is this a comedy or tragedy? Like McBride's last book, The Good Lord Bird, it seems to be a mix of both in equal parts. On the one hand, there are the buffoonish attempts by a hitman named Earl, who works for a drug kingpin named Bunch Moon, to take out Sportcoat in retribution for the shooting. Earl is bonked on the head with a pipe by an unknown assailant as Sportcoat and his friend help themselves to a bottle of Kong and, at another point, accidentally electrocuted during a failed attempt to revive a generator in the basement of one of the project buildings. Earl is almost a cartoonish figure in this way.

But there is also sadness and hardship everywhere. Sportcoat loses his wife, Hettie, early in the book, and spends a good amount of time in an imaginary back-and-forth with her about the hardships of black residents of New York. The drug dealer, Deems Clemons, was once a pitching prospect for St. John's University before throwing that away to deal heroin to project residents. A local cop, Potts, is just a few months away from retirement and is disillusioned by his profession and his marriage. There is even sympathy for a local mobster, The Elephant, who was brought into the business of smuggling by his father and is dismayed by the encroachment of drugs into his community and profession. For Sportcoat, all of this comes to a head 12 hours into his first sobriety in many decades. He visits a wounded Deems in the hospital, pins him down and says, "Now I know why I tried to kill you...For the life of goodness is not one that your people ahs chosen for you. I don't want that you should end up like me, or my Hettie, dead of sorrow in the harbor. I'm in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain't got many more Aprils left. .It's a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That's a good dream. That's a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can't remember 'em no more."

There is more -- much more. There is the Venus of Willendorf, which appears as a golden ticket for much of the cast, reinforcing one of the main themes of the book: That it is a community's women that keep it together. There are moonflowers. There is Hot Sausage. There is South Carolina. There is Harold Dean -- or, really, Haroldeen. There is Guido and The Mayor. There are bagels. There is Sister Paul. How to weave it all into a coherent summary is a bit beyond me. But James McBride makes it all sing.