Deacon vs. King Kong: Read an excerpt from James McBride’s novel
Deacon vs. King Kong will be released on May 31 by Ech – an imprint of the Czarna Owca publishing house. This brand publishes exceptional, high-profile, literary events. So far, thanks to this initiative, we have received e.g. And when you look back Juan Gabriel Vásquez, books Mariana Enriquez, Keepers Emmy Stonnex or Black leopard, red wolf Marlon James.
He is the author of the novel Deacon vs. King Kong James McBride – American writer and musician. He was awarded the National Book Award in 2013 for his novel The Good Lord Bird. He became famous thanks to his autobiography The Clolor of Water published in 1995.
You can read a description and an excerpt from the book below Deacon vs. King Kong. Tomasz S. Gałązka is responsible for the translation.
Deacon vs. King Kong – book description
In September 1969, a clumsy, grumpy old deacon known as Kurtałka enters the courtyard of the Cause estate in south Brooklyn, pulls a gun from his pocket and shoots a drug dealer at close range in front of everyone.
IN Deacon vs. King Kong McBride revives the people affected by the shooting: the victim, African Americans and Hispanics who witnessed it, white neighbors, local cops assigned to investigate, members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Kurtałka was a deacon, Italian gangsters in the neighborhood, and Kurtałka himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the fates of the characters – caught up in the turbulent maelstrom of New York in the 1960s – overlap in unexpected ways. As the truth comes out, McBride shows us that not all secrets should be kept hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
Deacon vs. King Kong – excerpt from the novel
Chapter 2
DEAD BODY
Of course, people from the Cause estate have been prophesying death to Kurtałka for years. Every spring, when the inhabitants of the communes emerged from their apartments like marmots emerging from their burrows to walk around the square and taste the fresh air that still remained on the estate, and due to the proximity of the sewage treatment plant there was not much of it, one of the tenants noticed Kurtałka plodded on after a night of sipping moonshine called King Kong at Rufus’s or a contracted whist at Silky’s on Van Marl Street and said, “He’s done.” When Kurtalka caught the flu virus in ’58, which destroyed half of Block 9, and ended up with the last wings pinned to Deacon Erskine of the Mighty Hand Word Tent, Sister BumBum said, “He’s getting it out of here.” When the ambulance came for him in ’62 after his third stroke, Ginny Rodriguez in block 19 grumbled, “No more man.” In the same year, Miss Izi from the Association for State Rights for Puerto Rico won lottery tickets to the New York Mets game at the Polo Grounds stadium. She bet the Mets to win, even though they had played 20 games this year, and they did, which prompted her to announce Kurtalka’s departure two weeks later. As she explained, Dominic Lefleur, the Haitian Sensation, had just returned from PortauPrince, where he was visiting his mother, and she herself had seen Kurtałka collapse as he stood at the door of his apartment on the third floor, swept away by an unknown virus brought that year by Dominic. As she said, “he made a big ass.” End. Chapel. After swept. As evidence, she also cited a black van from the city mortuary that came that night to pick up the body, but the very next morning she had to bark at everything because it turned out that the body in question belonged to a brother of Sensation from Haiti named El Haji, a convert to Islam, which broke his mother’s heart – the peasant had a heart attack after the first day of work as a city bus driver, and he had been trying for this position in the Transport Department for three years, people, it’s beyond belief.
Nevertheless, it seemed that Kurtałka was destined to die soon. In fact, even the more optimistic members of the Five Ends Baptist Church – where Kurtalka served as a deacon, as well as the president of the local chapter of the Forty-seventh Lodge of the Magnificent Brotherhood of Brooklyn Elk, for the staggering sum of sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents (payable annually, please by postal order only) ) gained from the leadership of the Five Ends Church a permanent guarantee of “burial of all members of the Brooklyn Elk Lodge who need the last service, naturally at cost”, with Kurtałka himself honorably serving as one of the pallbearers – they predicted his death. As sister Veronica Gee of the Five Ends soberly stated, “A jacket is a sick man.”
And she was right. At the age of seventy-one, Kurtałka has already experienced almost every disease known to mankind. He had gout. He had hemorrhoids. He had rheumatoid arthritis, which damaged his spine so much that on cloudy days he walked like a hunchback. He had a lemon-sized cyst on his left arm and a hernia the size of an orange in his groin. When the latter grew to the size of a grapefruit, doctors recommended surgery. Kurtałka ignored this, so a nice social worker from the local clinic signed him up for all possible inventions in the field of alternative treatment: acupuncture, magnetotherapy, herbal medicine, holistic therapies, applying leeches, step analysis or genetically modified plant-derived agents. Nothing helped.
