Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

But Sportcoat had something that nobody at Five Ends, nobody in the projects, nobody Deems Clemens had known in his entire nineteen years of growing up in the Cause Houses, had. Happiness. Sport was happy.

Of course you can’t buy good vegetables in the store anymore anyway. Tomatoes you buy now, they look so nice and shiny and red. When you get them home and slice them, they’re all red mush inside. They taste like nothing. How can you make spaghetti sauce with that?”

There is nothing on this earth so low as a mother or father who treats their child cruel.”

“You’re just like the white man. You change every story to suit your purpose. Listen to me for a change.”

He was white, so his word was the gospel. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.

He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.