by James McBride, 2020
I LOVED this book! It was the Old Town Library Book Club selection for April 2022. Both Leslie and Mandy picked it. It took me someplace I didn’t want to be – a housing project, the Cause Houses, in NYC – complete with drug pushers, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and criminals. But the main characters, the alcoholic and the drug pusher, are so human, you soon love them and are rooting for them. Deacon King Kong (Sportcoat) is a 70 year-old black man who has been drinking since he was a teenager, when the dentistry school used him to experiment on and gave him whiskey to ease the pain. His beloved wife, Hettie, disappears one night – following the light of God – and her body is found in the harbor by an Italian criminal who runs everything but drugs, Tommy Elefante. Elefante is another intriguing and wonderful character in this book. Along with Potts, an honest NYC cop who is about to retire; Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife who is beautiful and wise; Bunch Moon, an odious drug lord; and Deems Clemens, the promising young baseball player turned drug pusher, whom Sportcoat walks up to and shoots one day in 1969. He doesn’t kill him, just mangles his ear real bad. How everything turns out is a wonderful, wonderful tale. Thank you, James McBride – you are the best! You made ugly and hopeless be blessed and beautiful! Amazing! Thank you! God Bless YOU!
Things I LOVED:
Dedication page: “For God’s people–all of ’em”
Acknowledgments page: “Thanks to the humble Redeemer who gives us the rain, the snow, and all the things in between.”
Another character in the book is the Five Points Baptist Church, of which Sportcoat is a deacon. “What does a deacon do?” is a question Tommy Elefante wonders.
King Kong is the name of the Everclear that Rufus brews. Rufus is a janitor in a nearby housing project. He shares his King Kong with Sportcoat. They are good, good friends. Sportcoat is also a friend of Hot Sausage, the janitor of the Cause Houses. He drinks with Hot Sausage sometimes and Rufus other times. He is always drinking. But somehow, he showed love to Deems Clemens as he was growing up – the love that Deems didn’t get at home. He held him and warmed him up when he came to church cold. He taught him Sunday School, and he taught him how to play baseball. Deems could pitch like a pro and Sportcoat had high hopes for him. When Deems becomes a drug pusher instead, it makes Sportcoat so angry, he shoots him. Sportcoat doesn’t even remember doing it, but Hot Sausage keeps telling him he needs to leave town or he’s going to get killed. Such a good, good book, because all the good guys win and the bad guys lose. Thank you, again, James McBride!
We discussed the book on April 11, 2022. All but one person (Jennifer C.) liked it. She listened quietly for awhile and then started ranting about how she wanted to like this book because she hasn’t liked anything by James McBride, but she just didn’t like this book. Ugh. She made me not like her! How can you not like this book! There were a few ladies who disliked the humor-called it slapstick-and said there was no plot, but most of us loved it. Melissa (Mandy’s partner) started out not liking it but ended up loving it. Some of them went on and on about living in New York and not knowing anything like this neighborhood existed. And Jennifer C. was the one who selected Pachenko a few years ago, a book I detested. Maybe she can’t see how beautiful this book is, can’t see the love in the people and the light in the darkness. She really made me mad because she turned the whole discussion negative. There was one lady, Nancy, who loved the book, especially the love stories between Elefante and the Irish girl, and Potts and Sister Gee. One person said she really wanted to know what happened to the Christmas Club money – that is something I want to know also. There were some who thought the mystery of the Venus statue was far-fetched. I just thought the whole book was wonderful.
His mother consulted a medicine woman when he was five because he didn’t have any back teeth. The medicine woman told her to call him some other name for 8 months. She decided on “Sportcoat” because of the overseer who sat on his horse in a new sportcoat while she picked cotton. This is in Possum Point, South Carolina. When he grows back teeth at the age of ten, his mother pats him on the head and lays down for a nap and expires.
Here are some quotes I love:
“The boy never recovered from his mother’s death. The ache in his heart grew to the size of a watermelon. But the medicine woman was right. He grew enough teeth for two people. They sprouted like wildflowers. Bicuspids, molars, liners, fat long double chompers,wide teeth in the front, narrow teeth in the back. But there were too many of them, and they crowded his gums and had to be pulled out, the extractions dutifully done by delighted white dental students at the University of South Carolina, who desperately needed patients to work on to obtain their degrees and thus held Sportcoat dear, extracting his teeth and giving him sweet muffins and little bottles of whiskey as payment, for he’d discovered the magic of alcohol by then, in part to celebrate his father’s marriage to his stepmother, who often recommended he go play at Sassafras Mountain, 258 miles distant, and jump off the top naked. At age fourteen, he was a drunk and a dental student’s dream.”
At the beginning of Chapter 4 after he shot Deems:
“Sportcoat walked into the basement furnace room of Building 9 and sat on a foldout chair next to the giant coal furnace in a huff. He heard the wail of a siren, then forgot all about it. He didn’t care about any siren. He was looking for something. His eyes scanned the floor, then stopped as he suddenly remembered he was supposed to memorize a Bible verse for his upcoming Friends and Family Day sermon. It was about righting wrongs. Was it the book of Romans or Micah? He couldn’t recall. Then his mind slid to the same old nagging problem: Hettie and the Christmas Club money.”
See, Sportcoat doesn’t realize he has shot Deems. He can’t understand why Hot Sausage keeps telling him to leave. It’s because the drug lords are going to kill him, and they do send Earl to try and kill him, but each time Earl gets near, some miracle happens, slapstick-like, that hurts Earl and saves Sportcoat.
Here’s Tommy Elefante, telling Joe Peck, a drug lord, that he will not help him get his drug shipment. Tommy is enraged and Joe Peck knows it and knows he’s gone too far:
“Don’t come at me like that again, Joe. Find somebody else.”
“Elefante withdrew from the GTO and stood with his hands at his sides as Joe threw the GTO in gear and roared off. Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face. A dreamless, friendless, futureless, sorry-ass New York guy.
“Elefante watched the GTO turn the corner. He sighed and headed back to his Lincoln. He slowly slid his key into the lock, entered the car, and sat behind the steering wheel in silence, staring. He sat in the soft leather of the car for several long moments. Finally, he spoke aloud.
“I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”
In Chapter 12, Sportcoat is having a conversation with his dead wife, as happens often:
“I was lonely in my marriage,” she said.
“Stop complaining, woman! Food on the table. Roof over our heads. What else you want? Where’s the damn church money, by the way? I’m in a heap of trouble on account of it!”
“He lifted the Kong to his lips and gulped down a long swallow. She
watched him silently, then after a moment said, “Some of it’s not your fault.”
“Sure ain’t. You the one hid that money.”
“I ain’t talking about that,” she said, almost pensively. “I’m talking about the old days when you was a child. Everything ever said to you or done to you back then was at the expense of your own dignity. You never complained. I loved that about you.”
“Oh, woman, leave my people out of it. They long dead.”
In Chapter 15, the sweet conversation between the Irish cop, Potts, who is about to retire, and Sister Gee from the Five Ends Church (the pastor’s wife). He is investigating the murders that came about after Sportcoat shot Deems. They have fallen in love:
“He had reached the corner of the church when she called out, “When you get some more news, come on back.”
“He stopped. He didn’t turn but rather spoke over his shoulder. “It’s only going to be bad news.”
“She saw his profile, and it was beautiful, framed by the Statue of Liberty and the harbor, with several gulls flying overhead and beyond. And because he hadn’t uttered a desire to not return, her heart grew tiny wings again.
“Even if it’s bad news,” she said, “there’s good news bound up in it–if you’re the one bringing it.”
Sportcoat helps Elefante’s mother in her garden. One day, they were looking for pokeweed to help cure her and Tommy Elefante runs into Sportcoat leaving for the day:
“…She was a little shaky walking toward the end, but she done all right. We found it and she says it’s gonna make her feel better. I do hope it works.”
“Take a little extra, mister.” Elefante held out the money.
“If it’s all the same to you, sir, you already done me a world of good when our fellers pulled my Hettie out the water.”
“Elefante stared a moment. He wanted to say, “I don’t know how she got there,” but the truth was, to admit that was to confess knowledge of something in which he had no part, which made it sound like a denial. One denial led to another and to another, and no gangster worth his salt went down that road. Better to say nothing.
“The old man seemed to understand. “Oh, my Hettie was tired, is all. She was following God’s light. Looking for a moonflower, is what it was. It was a beautiful day when she died. Best funeral the church ever had.”
“Elefante shrugged, pocketed his money, and leaned against the wall of his house. “I used to see her come and go from church,” he said. “She’d say good morning. People don’t do that no more.”
“No they don’t.”
“She seemed like a nice lady. She always minded her business. Did she work?”
“Oh, she did day’s work and this and that. Mostly she just lived a life like most of us. She lived for going to heaven, mister.”
“Don’t we all?”
“Are you a religious man?” Sortcoat asked.
“Not really. Maybe a little.”
“Sportcoat nodded. He couldn’t wait to tell Sausage. He’d actually had a conversation with the Elephant. An honest-to-goodness gangster! And he wasn’t so bad! He was religious! A little, maybe?
“Well, I got to mosey on,” Sportcoat said. “I’ll see your momma next Wednesday.”
“All right, old-timer, What’s your name, by the way?”
“Folks call me Deacon Cuffy. Some calls me Sportcoat, but mostly in these parts they calls me Deacon.”
Elefante smiled. The old dud had a style about him. “Okay, Deacon. By the way, what does a deacon do?”
Sportcoat grinned. “Well now, that’s a good question. We do all sorts of things. We helps the church. We throws out the garbage. We buys the furniture sometimes. We shop for the food for the deaconesses to make for the repast and such. We even preaches from time to time if we is called upon. We does whatever needs to be done. We’re your holy handyman.”
“I see.”
“But mostly, truth be told, it’s women that runs most of your colored churches out here. Like my late wife, and Sister Gee and Bum-Bum.”
“Are they nuns?”
“No, I reckon not. They’re just sisters.”
“Real sisters?”
“No.”
Elefante’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Why call them sisters?”
“‘Cause we all brothers and sisters in Christ, mister. Come visit our church sometime. Bring your momma. You’ll see We likes visitors at Five Ends.”
“I might.”
“Well, I’ll leave you,” Sportcoat said. “And until we meet again, I hope God holds you in the palm of His hand.”
Elefante, who was about to head into the house, froze.
“Say that again” he said.
“Oh that’s a blessing my Hettie used to say to everybody she met. We say that in our church all the time to visitors. In fact, if you come visit us, you’ll hear it yourself. It’s our church motto, since before I come, and that’s been twenty years. In fact, there’s a picture of Jesus with that motto right over the top of his head outside on the back wall of the church. They got them words painted over his head in fancy gold letters. You can’t miss it.”
And that conversation is what Elefante needed to have in order to solve the mystery of where the Venus statue, worth millions, was hidden. His father had hidden it for a friend in prison and the only clue was that it was in God’s hand and Elefante couldn’t figure it out, until then. It turns out, Elefante’s father had been saved by a black woman walking home late at night. He wanted to repay her and the only way he could was by building the church. He did so, and placed the statue in the wall under the painting of Jesus holding his hands out.
Their conversation continues:
“Is it a picure or a painting? Covered over? Is the picutre covered over?”
Elefante stared at him so thoughtfully, curiosity etched in his face, yet for some reason Sportcoat felt, at that moment, that the spiritual part of his message was slipping. “No, it’s not covered over. Well, the church kinda painted over it a little over the years, fixed it up. Colored it up some. But you can still see him, plain as day. It’s not the words so much that’s wrote there that’s important, though,” he added, going back to making his spiritual pitch. “It’s the spirit of what Jesus wants, see. To hold you in the palm of His hand.”
Here are Sister Gee’s thoughts after talking with Potts and his fellow policemen about the murders by the harbor:
“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 came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number 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. … And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.
“She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief. And another after that. They saw the future, too, she could tell. It would continue forever. It was all so very grim.
“But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas, something that said, “Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God’s child. And I. Am Still. Here.” She felt God’s blessing at that moment, thanked him in her heart, for right then she could see that glimmer in their faces too, could see that they would understand what she was about to tell them, about the man who had wandered among them for most of his adult life…”
Sportcoat had fished Deems out of the harbor, saving his life. Deems was in the hospital and would recover. Sportcoat was drinking in Rufus’s basement, for three days now. Everyone is looking for him. He’s thinking about Hettie, his deceased wife:
“Sportcoat didn’t care. He was consumed with the events around fishing Deems out the water, the feel of being in the harbor water at night. He had never done that. Once many years ago when he first came to New York, when he and Hettie were young, they’d agreed they would try that one day–just jump into the harbor at night to see the shore from the water, to feel the water and what New York felt like from there. It was one of the many promises they’d made to each other when they were young. There were others. See the giant redwood trees in Northern California. Visit Hettie’s brother in Oklahoma. Visit the Bronx botanical garden to see the hundreds of plants there. So many resolutions, none of them ever fulfilled–except that one. In the end, though, she had done it alone. She had felt that water at night.”
Hettie appears to him in Rufus’s basement and they have a heart-to-heart talk, this time:
“I know all about your stepmother. I know everything: how she showed out to Jesus every Sunday and lived like a devil the rest of the week . . . doing improper things to you when you was but a wee child. Everything she ever done to you was wrong. The habits you acquired was put on you by the very folks who should have helped you be a better person. That’s why you like Deems so much. He come down that same road. That boy was beat up bad, grinded down from the day he was slapped to life.” …
“Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different…”
“The Star-Spangled Banner,'” she scoffed “I never did like that old lying, lollygagging, hypocritical, warring-ass drinking song. With the bombs bursting in air and so forth.”
“My Hettie wouldn’t talk this way,” Sportcoat sputtered. “You ain’t my Hettie. You’s a ghost.”
“Stop wasting what’s left of your sorry-ass life with your shameful fear of the dead!” She snapped. “I ain’t no ghost. I’m you. And stop goin’ ’round telling people I would have loved my funeral. I hated it”!
“It was a beautiful funeral!”
“Our cheap death shows make me sick,” she said calmly. “Why don’t folks in church talk about life? They hardly ever talk about the birth of Jesus Christ in church. But they never get tired of singing and reveling in Jesus’s death. Death is just one part of life. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all day long, the death of Jesus.”
“You the one that’s always hollering about Jesus! And how he gave you his cheese!”
“I holler about Jesus’s cheese because Jesus could baptize shit into sugar! Because if I didn’t have Jesus and his cheese, I’d kill somebody. That what Jesus did for me for sixty-seven years. He kept me sane, and on the right side of the law. But he run out of gas, sweetheart. He got tired of me. I don’t blame Him, for the hate in my heart done me in. I couldn’t see the man I loved so much, my Plant Man, stand by the window in our apartment sucking on crab legs and looking at the Statue of Liberty outside our window chatting about nothing, when I knowed all he wanted was for me to go back to bed so he could let a liquor bottle suck his guts out the minute I gone to sleep again. The evil I felt at that moment was enough to kill us both. So instead, I walked into the harbor. And I left myself in God’s hands.”
Sportcoat quits drinking then, cold turkey, and he visits Deems in the hospital and almost kills him by smothering him, and then releases him:
“…and Deems saw Sportcoat inches away from his face. 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.
“Now I know why I tried to kill you,” Sportcoat said. “For the life of goodness is not one that your people has 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.”
“He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit the headboard and he nearly passed out again.
“Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”
And the good guys live and the bad guys don’t. Deems leaves his life of crime and goes on to school and then on to be a pitcher for a minor league team. Elefante marries his Irish lass and helps her run the bagel shop. Sister Gee and Potts plan to meet. A wonderful ending – good conquers evil. Light overtakes the darkness. Love wins. LOVED THIS BOOK!
He’s written two other books: The Good Lord Bird and The Color of Water. I want to read those two also.