“In a housing project where 3,500 black and Spanish residents crammed their dreams, nightmares, dogs, cats, turtles, guinea pigs, Easter chicklets, children, parents, and double-chinned cousins from Puerto Rico, Birmingham, and Barbados into 256 tiny apartments, all living under the thumb of the wonderfully corrupt New York City Housing Authority, which for $43-a-month rent didn’t give a squirt whether they lived, died, shat blood, or walked around barefoot so long as they didn’t call the downtown Brooklyn office to complain, ants were a minor worry. Red Hook’s housing projects are an ideal setting for a cinematic tale of comic misadventure: McBride’s film and television work has no doubt helped him perfect the nimble pacing, vivid narration, and lively dialogue amply on display in Deacon King Kong. Both screenwriter and a producer for the series, McBride has also collaborated with director Spike Lee on the films Miracle at Santa Anna (an adaptation of McBride’s novel) and Red Hook Summer. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, a stunning reimagining of the story of abolitionist John Brown from the point of view of a pubescent cross-dressing runaway slave, won the National Book Award for fiction and will soon debut as a Showtime original limited series starring Ethan Hawke as Brown and Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton fame) as Frederick Douglass. Though best known for his acclaimed bestselling 1995 memoir, The Color of Water, James McBride is first and foremost a fiction writer. The story that grows from Sportcoat’s startling act of violence is vintage McBride: a cast of characters at once vivid and eccentric and yet complex and believable, a propulsive plot, relentless humor, and a prose style as fluid and melodic as a jazz trumpet solo played by a bebop virtuoso. “The old deacon could no more explain why he shot Deems than he could explain why the moon looked like it was made of cheese, or why fruit flies come and go, or how the city dyed the waters of the nearby Causeway Harbor green every Saint Paddy’s Day.” “The fact is, no one in the projects really knew why Sportcoat shot Deems - not even Sportcoat himself,” writes James McBride in Deacon King Kong.
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