What in the Sixties we used to call “rank-outs” or “snaps” appear here in a poetic form guaranteed to prompt laughter. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.Īnd for those who appreciate snappy dialogue, look no further. Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. Pick almost any paragraph, and you’ll find sprawling, delicious sentences like these, oozing with spicy flavor: But he’s the type of character who doesn’t care what anybody thinks, alternately perplexing, amusing, and horrifying everyone else.įrom that shooting springs a complicated, finely woven story, involving Five Ends, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, the racism that warps life in the projects, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope.Ī portion of the Red Hook Houses project, south Brooklyn, as it appeared in 2012 at Lorraine and Henry Streets (courtesy Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons public domain)īut I’d be doing Deacon King Kong a disservice if I failed to mention what a rollicking good time the novel is. Sportcoat claims not to have understood what he was doing, but nobody believes that, least of all, the police. Or thinks he does, and nobody can persuade him otherwise.Įxcept that in summer 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a teenage kingpin of the Cause drug traffic, and his former baseball protégé, at point-blank range. These days, the former deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church spends his time high on King Kong, the popular name for a friend’s moonshine, and talks to his late wife, Hettie.
His finest moment came umpiring the Cause baseball team, now disbanded. But to the residence of the Causeway Housing Projects (the Cause) in south Brooklyn, he’s Sportcoat, because of the colorful assortment he wears of that garment. Even the police confuse him with someone else, because he shares a driver’s license with another man, which makes his official record almost untraceable. Review: Deacon King Kong, by James McBrideįew people even know his real name, because he never uses it.
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