But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope.The New York Times bestseller ' felt, beautifully written, and profoundly humane.' -The New York Times Book Review cover'Hilarious.A rich and vivid multicultural history.' -Time MagazineFrom James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird and the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, one of the most anticipated novels of the year: a wise and witty tale about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting.In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a. They saw the future, too, she could tell. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief.

The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.

“there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. “And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich-West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious-and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.”

Deacon King Kong by James McBride