Deacon King Kong

Deacon King Kong is at its heart the story of a community grappling with social change in 20th-century America. The novel is populated with various characters in and surrounding the Cause Houses, which act as the epicenter of the novel’s conflicts and action. This common location and the Brooklyn neighborhood in which the Cause is located give all the characters a unifying identity, even if they relate to the area differently (for example, Potts works in the neighborhood but doesn’t live there, and Elefante doesn’t live in the Cause Houses but is still a part of the larger neighborhood). In a video interview from August 2020 shortly after Deacon King Kong was published, McBride states that he views the story as being chiefly about a community. He says that Sportcoat’s attempt to shoot Deems “hits all the levers and gets all the elevators started” (Award-Winning Author… 02:09-02:13), a metaphor that implies that members of the community act as parts of a larger whole, influencing and affecting one another.

McBride also says that the events of the book “[move] this whole community to act in concert” (Award-Winning Author… 02:21-02:23). Deacon King Kong portrays a community that is threatened by destructive social forces outside of its control, such as racism, poverty, immigration that erodes traditional communities (a displacement that sometimes results in a new, diverse community such as that of the Cause and its neighborhood), the increased presence of hard drugs and resulting addiction and crime, and the individual and collective despair that can result because these forces were so concentrated on minorities in late 20th-century America.

Sportcoat’s behavior toward Deems is therefore a communal catharsis in which Sportcoat acts as a representative of the older generations of the Cause community who are exasperated and dismayed by the trajectory of its young people. Sportcoat, like other older characters in the book, invests in the young people of his community through mentoring and building close, caring personal relationships. Deems serves as an especially strong example of this type of intergenerational relationship. When the young people become increasingly dependent on outside illegal drug operations just to make a living, begin experiencing drug addiction themselves, and disrupt the larger social fabric through violence and disrespect, the older generations become frustrated and pessimistic about the future of their community. Sportcoat and Deems act as an archetype of this dynamic. Sportcoat and Elefante’s cooperation with each other to find the Venus statue signals that previously isolated communities and groups must join together and form bonds of personal relationships and respect. This helps communities experience resiliency and enables the characters to partially overcome the social forces that threaten their well-being.

At Sportcoat’s funeral, community unity and identity have been restored and preserved in keeping with the book’s overarching hopeful message. To emphasize this point, the gathering of various groups to remember Sportcoat is called a “homecoming” (355), suggesting that the community has undergone a collective journey of reckoning against the destructive social forces that threaten its future, returning to its place of origin for a symbolic final act of unity. The funeral also gives the narrator the chance to relate how the events of the book have impacted individual characters, suggesting yet again that Sportcoat is associated with communal change and growth. The list of characters on pages 355-359, with their relationships to Sportcoat and reactions to his death, acts as a litany that binds the seemingly disparate characters together.   

Interview source: “Award-Winning Author James McBride on Social Justice and ‘Deacon King Kong.’” YouTube, uploaded by Amanpour and Company, 3 Aug. 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsfzaF1KUY