Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

If he shows—and he probably won’t—he’ll ask about your health. That’s how you’ll know it’s him.”

The thing is called the Venus, by the way. The Venus of Willendorf. She’s in God’s hands. That’s what your poppa said to me. In a letter.”

Bunch Moon

Earl Morris,

“Deems Clemens.”

the Cause.

“Adios motherfucker . . . we know you ain’t sending no pesos!”

while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and

Deems Clemens, the best pitcher the Cause Houses had ever seen, and the most ruthless drug dealer in the history of the Cause Houses.

without his right ear. Fucking Sportcoat.

consistent. He never complained, or gave opinions. He didn’t judge. He didn’t care. Sport had his own thing, which is why Deems liked him.

Waiting on Jesus.

of growing up in the Cause Houses, had. Happiness. Sport was happy.

Of course Pudgy was smart, because he was Sportcoat’s son. And Sport treated kids like equals, even his own.

“Mr. Joe”: Joe Peck, whose family owned the funeral home over on Silver Street. “Deems, he’s mob,” Beanie said slowly.

I’m making things a little better for somebody. Same with you.

Hot Sausage is the head janitor

move they’re making, it’s sideways,” she said. “Sportcoat’s seventy-one. He ain’t no drug dealer.”

Joaquin was on a roll. The band chunked forward. They did not notice Sportcoat.

The reference to Hot Sausage’s part-time lover and the church organist, Sister Bibb,

Like most in the Cause, he had known Soup all his life.

When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.

Thelonius Ellis. You know him?” Sausage had taken a seat on the top step of the building entrance when the women arrived. From his seat on the step, Sausage

I’mma get these kids ’round here on the right track again.”

“The Nation of Islam.”

got no country. I’m a citizen of the world. A Muslim.”

his guys pulled that lady out of the water, the church coloreds had dropped off two sweet potato pies and a cooked chicken outside his railroad boxcar. Why couldn’t more people get along that way?

Joe Peck, whose family

became. Driscoll Sturgess, he decided, the Governor himself, might have the answer—if there was one at all.

At forty, Elefante was lonely.

Joe Peck, the only other made member of the Gorvino family in the Cause District, had jumped into the dope game with both feet,

“I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”

“No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.”

“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .” “Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.” “Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.” “Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .”

Twenty minutes later, Earl woke up in the alley behind Building

Elefante, her face flushed a deep red, and at that moment Elefante saw his future.

“Because a man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.”

And he proceeded to talk.

the big boys who forgot the war and the pogroms and the lives of the people who survived World War I and World War II sacrificing blood and guts for their America, so they could work with the banks and the city and state to slap expressways in the middle of thriving neighborhoods and send the powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a bigger percentage.

Any man his father trusted had to be a loving, good man.

His mother didn’t care about the coloreds. She saw them just as people. She cared about plants, and digging for them in the empty lots around their neighborhood—plants, she insisted, that had kept her husband alive long after most expected him to be gone.

My poppa couldn’t stand Macy. He used to say, ‘Macy likes boys.’

Wonderful things: Bibles with solid-gold covers. Relics. Manuscripts rolled into tubes made of gold. Gold coins. Diamond reliquaries with the bones of old saints inside. He said, ‘This stuff is a thousand years old.’ I said, ‘You’re a millionaire.’

“A fat girl. The Venus of Willendorf.”

“He just told me about that stupid song you sing, about the palm of God’s hand.”

pay three million dollars cash for it.”

He calls me almost every week now. He says he can move it.

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

he wondered if he had ever actually been in love or if love was, as his grandmother used to say, a kind of discovery of magic.

“Well . . . as long as he’s got God in his life some kind of way.”