Something to Read: Deacon King Kong
When I started reading James McBride’s 2020 novel, Deacon King Kong, I got mad. I liked it, and I didn’t have a lot of time to sink my teeth into it. But every chance I got, I read a few pages because it was so good.
Set in 1969, the book takes place in the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. The characters and storyline are so true to the experience of Black people living in low-income housing that it sucked me in. I was totally immersed.
The novel’s title character is a Black deacon from a poor, small church in Brooklyn. His name comes from his favorite homebrew liquor — King Kong — which he often consumes to the point of drunkenness. The characters spend a lot of time in the church, and Black church culture is presented in fine detail.
The book is a fun read, and the writing is amazing. Black project life can be both tragic and funny, and the author takes you both places (sometimes at the same time).
While I was reading it, someone told me that it’s Barack Obama’s favorite book. In 2015, Obama awarded McBride (who is also known for his memoir The Color of Water and the novel The Good Lord Bird) the National Humanities Medal.
Real professional writers do amazing things with words. Here’s an example from the book that encapsulates some of what the novel’s about in one long sentence:
The republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too Black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a Page 1 story, while phony versions of Black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich — West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious — and on it went, the whole business of white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City that Never Sleeps, while the Blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.
Stefan Roots blogs at Chester Matters.
