Deacon King Kong

“Everyone had a reason to be crazy in the Cause. There was mostly a good reason behind everything.

Until Sportcoat shot Deems. That was different. Trying to find reason in that was like trying to explain how Deems went from being a cute pain in the ass and the best baseball player the projects had ever seen to a dreadful, poison-selling, murderous meathead with all the appeal of a cyclops. It was impossible.” 

Deems’s evolution from mischievous neighborhood boy to hardened drug dealer is significant because it drives so much of the story. The narrator concludes that the process is inexplicable, which increases the sense of powerlessness and frustration that Sportcoat feels about Deems’s choice. The diction of the passage also underscores how many of the Cause residents feel about Deems: “dreadful, poison-selling, murderous meathead” is not a complimentary description and is worlds away from the precocious boy the residents used to know. 

“Jet, terrified, stared at the old man, who squinted back at him in the afternoon sun, which had come up high now. Their eyes locked, and at that moment Jet felt as if he were looking into the ocean. The old man’s gaze was deep-set, detached, calm, and Jet suddenly felt as if he were floating in a spot of placid sea while giant waves roiled and swelled and lifted up the waters all around him. He had a sudden revelation. We’re the same, Jet thought. We’re trapped.”

At the pivotal moment of the shooting, Jet has this intense encounter with Sportcoat in which he understands that the two, as Black men struggling to survive against unjust social systems, are “trapped.” The calm resignation with which Sportcoat seems to regard Jet makes the young man believe that their fates must be met with resignation and acceptance. Sportcoat feeling “trapped” also leads him to perform the desperate violent acts toward Deems in the hope of reforming him.

“It bothered [Elefante] that people, even cops, feared him. But it was the only way. He had done a few terrible things over the years, but only to defend his interests. Of course he’d done some nice things too, but got no credit for any of them. It was how the world worked.” 

Elefante reflects cynically that his reputation as a mobster is the first and only thing people notice about him. McBride adds depth to Elefante’s character by portraying him as someone who is also interested in helping others and performing good actions despite his criminal background. This passage adds to the senses of disillusionment and dissatisfaction with which Elefante views his criminal/smuggling activities, which later drives him to make changes in his life. 

“‘We ain’t tearing down our community, brother. We’re building it up. Look at all the businesses I got. The jobs we’re providing. The help we give people. Is the white man opening car washes? Is he running car-rental places? Restaurants? Is he giving us jobs?’ He pointed to the window, the filthy street, the abandoned cars, the dead brownstones. ‘What’s the white man doing for us out here, Earl? Where’s he at?’” 

In this passage, Bunch points out to Earl that the businesses and prosperity he brings into the neighborhood through drug profits are filling a social and economic void that those in power refuse to fill for minorities. This is Bunch’s way of justifying his criminal activities. Bunch’s fate in the novel suggests that the ends don’t justify Bunch’s means.

“Of course no one in the Cause paid much attention to the March of the Ants. In a housing project where 3,500 black and Spanish residents crammed their dreams, nightmares, dogs, cats, turtles, guinea pigs, Easter chicklets, children, parents, and double-chinned cousins from Puerto Rico, Birmingham, and Barbados into 256 tiny apartments, all living under the thumb of the wonderfully corrupt New York City Housing Authority, which for $43-a-month rent didn’t give a squirt whether they lived, died, shat blood, or walked around barefoot so long as they didn’t call the downtown Brooklyn office to complain, ants were a minor worry.” 

This passage gives context and perspective on the size of the Cause Houses population. The immigrant/migrant status of many of the residents is described using place names that are located outside New York City. Furthermore, the callousness of the institutions responsible for creating more humane living conditions is highlighted, and the low rent rate is used to illustrate the poverty—and disposability to those in authority—of the residents. 

“And no resident in their right mind would go over their heads to the mighty Housing Authority honchos in Manhattan, who did not like their afternoon naps disturbed with minor complaints about ants, toilets, murders, child molestation, rape, heatless apartments, and lead paint that shrunk children’s brains to the size of a full-grown pea in one of their Brooklyn locations, unless they wanted a new home sleeping on a bench at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.” 

In this continuation of the same passage as quote #6, “minor” housing complaints like ants and toilets are lumped in with serious offenses (murders, child molestation, rape, etc.). This illustrates the instability and hardships of the world inhabited by New York City’s poor, who have found that their complaints are insufficient to move the housing authorities to make any kind of change. The mention of “afternoon naps” creates a contrast between the leisured, privileged world of those authorities and the merciless, unjust one of the people they are supposed to be serving. 

“And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in 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 one story, while phone 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 busines of the 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.”

The contrasts between the world of New York City’s wealthy and the poor are again emphasized in this passage. The use of the term “Republic of Brooklyn” increases the sense that the borough is its own world or entity, where a different, arbitrary set of standards is acceptable in terms of human flourishing (or lack thereof). These rules are created and enforced by those in power, who keep the poor and minorities subservient while profiting off of gentrified versions of their stories (as exemplified by the names of Broadway musicals that have storylines about minority characters—often written by White people).

“They both felt it, felt themselves suddenly being propelled along a large chasm, feeling the irresistible urge to reach out, to reach across, to stretch their hands from opposite sides of a large, cavernous valley that was nearly impossible to cross. It was way too large, too far, just unreasonable, ridiculous. Yet…” 

“They both felt it, felt themselves suddenly being propelled along a large chasm, feeling the irresistible urge to reach out, to reach across, to stretch their hands from opposite sides of a large, cavernous valley that was nearly impossible to cross. It was way too large, too far, just unreasonable, ridiculous. Yet…” 

“Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn’t matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.”

The narrator’s depiction of jail time as inevitable despite whatever amount of skill or intelligence one has (the tiniest ant can slip out of sight; the rocket ship can move quickly from one place to another) raises questions about the justice of the policing system in McBride’s New York City. The sense of inevitability is reinforced by the metaphor of a hammer dropping on someone’s head, a process that is partially driven by gravity, a force that cannot be overcome.

“No one appreciated Genoan focaccia except the Genoans. ‘Best bread in the world,’ his father used to say. ‘It’s the cheese.’ Elefante tried it once and understood then why Genoans were a miserable lot, because life was nothing compared to the delicious taste of Genoan food; once they got to the food, the business of life, whatever that business was—loving, sleeping, standing at the bus stop, shoving each other at the grocery store, killing each other—had to be done with speed so as to get to the food, and they did it was such silent grit, such determination and speed, that to get in the way of it was like stepping into a hurricane. Christopher Columbus, his mother pointed out, was a Genoan who wasn’t looking for America. He was looking for spices. For food.” 

This quote examines the relationship between Elefante’s heritage and fulfillment (symbolized here by food). He comes to understand this heritage through his mother’s input. The desire for fulfillment and security at great cost from Elefante’s heritage manifests itself in his motivation to find love and to leave the world of crime.

“The rage had already poured out of him like lava, unrelenting and merciless, steaming over whoever or whatever was in the way, and the sorry soul on the receiving end saw nothing more than a blank stare of cold clarity. Were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the lonely man with the kind heart who ordered his obedient crew to pull poor old colored women out of the harbor who had landed there for one reason or another, and why shouldn’t they, since New York was shit? Or were they seeing the eyes of Tommy Elefante, the shy Brooklyn bachelor who dreamed of escaping Brooklyn to move to a farm in New Hampshire and marry a fat country girl and even had the looks and charm to find one, but was too kind to drag any woman into his life of brutality and stealth, which had made his mother a prison widow and half-mad eccentric, a life that had diced his father’s kindness into bits?” 

This passage focuses on the emotional complexity behind Elefante’s character. He experiences moments of anger and rage but also performs kind actions that aren’t self-serving, as when he pulls Hettie’s body out of the harbor. Elefante realizes that he lives in a cruel and unjust world and tries to ameliorate it when he can. The emotional impact of his father’s imprisonment is also examined—Elefante suspects that it made his father a crueler person, and that his mother was affected by her husband’s incarceration to the extent that she’s now a “half-mad eccentric.”

“Perhaps they saw neither; perhaps they saw only the outer shell: the silent, cold, brutal Elephant, whose calculating calm and mum stare said, ‘You are finished,’ and who dispatched them with the matter-of-fact speed and brutality of a Category 5 hurricane, ripping everything apart as he went.” 

The use of a natural force as a metaphor for Elefante’s cruelty (“a Category 5 hurricane”) illustrates the power and force with which he conducts his business. It also lends a sense of powerlessness that suggests that Elefante doesn’t really desire to be brutal but is forced to be so. The phrase “outer shell” also suggests that this isn’t Elefante’s true self, just the one he feels forced to assume.

“They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them. Brooklyn traffic roared aboveground. In Borough Hall, twenty blocks away, the Brooklyn borough president was welcoming Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. In Flushing, Queens, the New York Mets, the former dogs of baseball and now the toast of the town, were warming up for a game at Shea Stadium under TV lights with fifty-six thousand people in the stands. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Bella Abzug, the flamboyant Jewish congresswoman, was meeting with fund-raisers to consider a run for president. Meanwhile, the two old men sitting in the basement sipping moonshine were having a mojo contest[.]”

This passage contrasts the types of “modern,” progressive events that are happening in the city while Sportcoat and Hot Sausage engage in a conversation about an ancient and “backwards” belief. Like the passages that highlight the economic disparity between various parts of New York City, this passage highlights that beliefs and attitudes in the city are mixed and diverse. Such a contrast implies that the world that the two men live in is in some ways isolated from that of the city they live in.

“She loved this kind of talk. How was it that he could draw this foolish chatter out of her? Her discourse with her husband, what little conversation they had, was made up of stunted, dry, matter-of-fact grunts about bills paid, church business, the affairs of their three grown children, who were, thankfully, living away from the Cause Houses. At forty-eight, most days she awakened feeling like there was nothing left to live for other than her church and her children. She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things that he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, preferably at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.” 

Sister Gee reflects on the differences between her feelings for Potts and her relationship with her husband, who has disappointed and distanced himself from her. This creates a nuanced portrayal of her character and helps explain her attraction to Potts, who has emotional needs that aren’t being met by his wife. Their mutual needs and disappointment in their marriages unite them. 

“That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front of our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our sons to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can give our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control.” 

This passage explains why Sportcoat is so fixated on and distressed about the Christmas Club money that he can’t find. Various social problems like inadequate schools, the racial aspects behind forced military service, and the exploitation of minorities by drug dealers are all presented as things outside of the community’s control. The Christmas money, however, represents their ability to improve the lives of their children—even in a small way. This explains the importance of the Christmas box and the significance of Elefante replacing it to the church community at the end of the novel. 

“Sister Gee looked at the people staring at her: Dominic, Bum-Bum, Miss Izi, Joaquin, Nanette, and the rest, at least fifteen people in all. She’d known most of them her whole life. They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that comes from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their numbers were down—gone, changed forever, dead or not, it didn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin, were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hold summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems.” 

Sister Gee regards her neighbors with a mix of sadness and resignation about the outcomes they can expect in the future. She is still in her mindset of pessimism, an outlook that will be replaced with hope by the end of the book. This quote highlights the community members’ various hardships, capped off by the injustice of experiencing blame for problems they didn’t create. 

“And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, specks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like, ‘You gotta believe,’ when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugar-cane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.” 

This continuation of the passage in quote #17 emphasizes the various obstacles that face minorities in realizing the “American dream.” Sister Gee reflects ironically that the idea that it is universally and equally attainable places the blame for failing to do so on the individual, not on social systems that discriminate against minorities. The references in this passage to the “cotton gin” and “sugar-cane field” evoke America’s history of enslaving and exploiting Black people for profit, and Sister Gee sees in drugs a continuation of that pattern. 

“He’d always liked Tommy Elefante. Tommy was like the father—but with words. Silent as old Guido was, there was a grim goodness to the old man, an honesty and sense of humor that Potts, despite himself, always appreciated.”

Despite Elefante’s often-resentful relationship with his father, Potts sees a resemblance between father and son in that there are admirable qualities beneath the surface of crime and brutality. Potts believes that as a police officer, he “shouldn’t” recognize and appreciate these qualities. However, doing so is in line with his characteristics as depicted in his relationship with Sister Gee, where their interracial status and marriage “should” have prevented them from forming a relationship. In both cases, Potts obeys his instincts rather than abiding by the “should” or “should-not.” 

“And from there, so close, he saw in the old man’s face what he had felt down in the darkness of the harbor when the old man had yanked him to safety: the strength, the love, the resilience, the peace, the patience, and this time, something new, something he’d never seen in all the years he’d known old Sportcoat, the happy-go-lucky drunk of the Cause Houses: absolute, indestructible rage.” 

This passage, coming at the moment Sportcoat pulls Deems out of the harbor, suggests that Sportcoat drinks in part to suppress his anger over the Black community’s struggles and powerlessness. Drinking is Sportcoat’s way of silencing that part of himself, and his abstention from alcohol later in the book signals that he is aware of and confronting his anger rather than repressing it. The close relationship between Deems and Sportcoat is also revealed through the nurturing, gentle qualities that Deems sees in the older man.

“There was danger everywhere now, full-out shooting coming because of the whites, the blacks, the Spanish, the Irish cops, the Italian families, the drug wars. It wouldn’t stop. Yet despite the dark days ahead he felt himself moving into a light of a different kind. The wonderful, bursting, gorgeous, eye-opening panorama of light that love can bring into a lonely man’s life.” 

This passage from Elefante’s perspective reveals that the neighborhood is still on the brink of violence and conflict between various groups. However, Elefante’s personal happiness lessens the weight of this threat to him as he successfully pursues a romantic relationship with Melissa. This serves as an example of strong personal relationships, particularly across community “lines,” mitigating against the destructive social forces that would otherwise harm individuals and communities. 

“Until then he’d always believed a partner brought worry, fear, and weakness to a man, especially one in his business. But Melissa brought courage and humility and humor to places he’d never known existed. He’d never partnered with a woman before, if you didn’t include his mother, but Melissa’s quiet sincerity was a weapon of a new kind. It drew people in, disarmed them. It made them friends—and that was a weapon too.”

Elefante’s appreciation of Melissa’s qualities is striking because he uses language of conflict (“weapon”) to describe her effectiveness in getting along with people. This suggests that Elefante is still steeped in the language of the world of crime but has reappropriated it to include emotional traits as well as physical ones. He also recognizes that Melissa’s “weapon” is used for opposite purposes as the ones he might use in the criminal world—it brings people together (“made them friends”) rather than driving them farther apart. 

“You walk in here without a can of sardines, nor gift, nor bowl of beans, not even a glass of water to offer somebody who is aiming to give you a free hand to the thing you come for. And you don’t even know if you gonna hit the bull’s-eye on that or not. You is like most white men. You believes you is entitled to something you ain’t got no hand in. Everything in the world got a price, mister. Well now, the bottom rail’s on top, sir, for I has been walked on all my life, and I don’t know you from Adam. You could be Italian, being that the old suit you wearing has got wine stains all over it. On the other hand, you could be some fancy-figuring devil-may-care wino pretending to be Mr. Guido’s son. I don’t know why you is here in the first place, mister. I don’t know the deacon that good. He didn’t explain nothing to me about you. Like most mens, he don’t feel he got to explain nothing to a woman, including his own wife, who did all the frying and cooking and hair straightening while he rumbled ‘round throwing joy juice down his throat for all them long years he done it.” 

Sister Paul chastises Elefante in this passage for disrespecting her—coming to her place of residence without bringing her a token gift or offering in the manner of traditional politeness, which honors elders and those who you hope to receive something from. Sister Paul attributes this to Elefante’s status as a White man, making the racial power structures of American culture clear. She also disparages Sportcoat, saying that she doesn’t know much about him or Elefante, and decrying Sportcoat’s drinking while Hettie worked to support them.

“I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody’s explained nothing to me. I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir. Now I ask it again. For the last time—and if you don’t show your points here, then you can slip your corns inside them little Hush Puppy shoes of yours with the little quarters inside ‘em and git on down the road. Do you do?”

Sister Paul ends her speech with a query of whether Elefante intends to perform racial justice and reparation with the money he receives from the Venus reward. She highlights her disappointment in the promises made by White people many times in her life, and she wants reassurance that he will fulfill them. After this passage ends, Melissa, who has a better rapport and understanding of Sister Paul than Elefante, vouches for Elefante and says that he will “do.” This satisfies Sister Paul in a way that would have eluded Elefante if he spoke for himself.