Deacon King Kong by James McBride
It's 1969, Causeway Housing Projects Brooklyn, New York. Cuffy Lambkin, lovingly known as Deacon, or Sportcoat is a drunk, he is also one of the most compassionate, giving man you will meet until the day he shoots Deems Clemens that is.
James McBride creates a world where hardship, violence, service, kindness, and lovable characters roam the projects in Brooklyn.
Deacon King Kong is a story of endurance, addiction, community, mobsters, race relations and some of the funniest near misses I have ever read. I wasn't sure what Deacon King Kong was going to be like when I requested it from Edelweiss+ to review. I just knew that 1969 was a great year, the year that I was born, an Island away in Long Beach. I also knew that Housing Projects (could the Causeway Houses be a replication of the Red Hook Housing Projects?) were a hard place to live, a place where the people who lived there didn't actually plan on living in squalor, they came to live where opportunity abounds- New York or so they thought, they needed to live in low-income housing as they were not making what they thought they would come from Europe, and the southern United States. What they ended up at was a place where drugs are dolled out and sold like candy, where hopelessness exists and yet the people there do what they can to create some joy and a sense of community even in the midst of a place where the city doesn't take care of its citizens.
Mcbride's characters are rich in personality, rich in imagery, rich in love for their fellow residents and poor as poor can be in the money. Deacon, his best friend, Hot Sausage, Sister Gee, the wife of Reverend Gee of Five Ends Church, 19 year old Deems Clemens the local drug dealer, Officer Potts, and the rest of the cast will grab your heart, make you want to cheer, and also make you want to scream all at the same time.
**** addition to post 7/30/20: Applebooks has a discussion guide since Oprah Winfrey picked this book as her July Book Club read. One of the great parts of this guide is the author's explanation of why he wrote Deacon King Kong. I really loved what he had to say:
“Why I Wrote Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
I can’t think of many instances when I’ve heard the power brokers in my Brooklyn church refer to politics, or sociology, or social sciences, or any of the cool things I heard about in school. As a child, I went to a small Baptist church run by folks who spent the majority of their lives doing the jobs that kept New York running: they fixed electric wiring for Con Ed; they drove the buses on the streets and the subways that rolled below; they delivered the bread, the freight, the food, and the milk that sustained the city. They cleaned the houses and worked at the grocery stores and drove trucks and put sliding panel doors in homes. They worked all week and preached the gospel and sang on Sundays, and when the service was done they cleaned the church bathroom, swept the sanctuary, and made sure the building was neat and spotless, and then they went home — to do the same thing the next week.
I never thought much of it until I became a man and saw the life I lived and those I admired shown as rampant oddballs in a world of internet and media savagery. Yelling gospel music to sell hamburgers. Pouring wine on cellphones to show how waterproof the phones are. Eating chicken on the air while listening to rap music that had been co-opted to include every beastly, negative, stereotypical behavior one could imagine. The rich culture had been co-opted, the once bountiful enthusiasm, creativity, and humor I loved so much were raked across the grill of commercialism and sports entertainment so ceaselessly that it became nearly unrecognizable.
That is not a racial problem, by the way. That’s an American problem. When you pour cheap wine on the glorious silk tapestry that represents the vast diversity and richness of the cultures from which we all emanate and then place it on sale to the highest bidder, you get what you get.
Humor transcends the cheapness that we allow ourselves to descend to. It brings us back to who we are. It is the aorta, the river of happiness upon which we are all welcome. We can all laugh. There is nothing funnier than watching two Latino brothers arguing over the cost of a brake job, or hearing Italian rappers performing rap music that had been co-opted to include every beastly, negative, stereotypical behavior one could imagine. The rich culture had been co-opted, the once bountiful enthusiasm, creativity, and humor I loved so much were raked across the grill of commercialism and sports entertainment so ceaselessly that it became nearly unrecognizable.
Humor transcends the cheapness that we allow ourselves to descend to. It brings us back to who we are. It is the aorta, the river of happiness upon which we are all welcome. We can all laugh. There is nothing funnier than watching two Latino brothers arguing over the cost of a brake job, or hearing Italian rappers performing rap music, or hearing my sister say, “You look like a moron.” It’s just funny. Some of it’s not politically correct, but funny is funny. A humorist knows your heart. Humor is a way of accepting a person’s humanity.
I wanted Deacon King Kong to be funny. But to say that every character in the book is inspired by someone I know or once knew is not quite accurate. When I work with characters, I look to the inner soul. When someone moves to a higher calling of decency and kindness, their history, their politics, their social and cultural views are beyond their skin and their own talents. That’s a God-given thing. The outer business are just labels. Black, white, Arab, Asian, Chinese, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Latino, these are just words. I’m not interested in those words. They disable and cripple creativity. They squelch the fire and scorching truthfulness of humor, which allows us to accept the hard-won peace that the decent people of this world try to enjoy in small pieces every day.
There is a small war of the soul that happens every day for all living souls who have spent their lives growing and guarding the small piece of enjoyment known as life. Humor feeds that enjoyment. This little piece of life’s enjoyment, for whatever it’s worth, cost someone before me, and someone behind me, and the person before that and the one behind that, and for all of them, I am grateful. Because the end result is the laughter that allows you and I to be free, or to find the path to freedom, so that we might learn to love one another again.
That’s why I wrote this book.”
Thank you, Edelweiss+, Penguin Books, and James McBride for the opportunity to read this book in lieu of my honest review.
Comments
Post a Comment