Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

again, grimly walking past one another, tight-lipped, pale, never smiling, marching stolidly down the small, drenched streets as the cold sea splashed over the sidewalks and even over them and them not noticing it, the smell of stinking sea and nearby fisheries climbing onto their clothing, into their miserable tiny houses, their drapes, and even into their food, the people ignoring it, plodding forward with grim determination like robots, having accepted their fate as unhappy sons of bitches living in the shadow of happy Nice, France, to the west and under the sunshine disdain of their poor dark cousins to the south, Florence and Sicily, who laughed like dancing Negroes, happy and content to be the black Ethiopians of Europe, while their smiling cousins on the Mediterranean Sea, the French, sunned themselves topless on the lovely beaches of the Riviera. All the while the hardworking, joyless Genoans marched on grimly, eating their fucking focaccia. 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