Deacon King Kong: Chapter 23: Last Octobers Summary & Analysis

After three days in the hospital, Deems wakes up with a painful buzzing noise in his ear. He is still in immense pain and cannot put any weight on his left shoulder. While in the hospital, Deems doesn’t get many visitors. Only the police, Sister Gee, and a few other sisters from the Five Ends come to see him. However, Deems doesn’t say anything to any of his visitors. Instead, he continues to think about what happened to him. He knows now for sure that he was betrayed, probably by Lightbulb. 

However, today Deems wakes up to a new face: Sportcoat. To Deem’s surprise, Sportcoat isn’t wearing his usual coat, which gave him his moniker. Instead, he’s wearing the outfit of a Housing Authority worker and clutching a “hideous” homemade doll that’s roughly the size of a pillow. Startled, Deems asks Sportcoat about the doll. Sportcoat tells Deems that the doll is for him; he got it from a Dominican man who lives in his building. It is said to bring good luck and the Dominican man made it specifically for Deems.

Sportcoat pulls out another gift for Deems: a small exercise ball that Sportcoat says will improve the strength of Deems’s pitching hand. Sportcoat’s gifts make Deems angry, and he vulgarly asks why Sportcoat is here. Sportcoat is put off by Deems’s language, and he tells Deems that he’s come a long way to see him. Annoyed, Deems tells him to leave and Sportcoat refuses. He promises not to ask Deems about any of his business. Instead, Sportcoat says, he’s come to handle some business of his own.

Annoyed, Deems starts to mock Sportcoat and calls him “Deacon King Kong.” Sportcoat tells Deems that he cannot hurt him by calling him names. He’s much more concerned about his two friends who are currently in the hospital. In fact, he just got back from talking to Hot Sausage. Together, the two of them talked about Deems’s future in baseball. When Sportcoat relates this conversation to Deems, it only makes Deems angrier. He begins cursing at Sportcoat again.

Still, Sportcoat doesn’t understand where Deems’s hostility is coming from. He asks Deems why he is so angry, and Deems reminds him that before Haroldeen shot him, Sportcoat shot him as well. Sportcoat responds by saying that he doesn’t even remember the incident. This only makes Deems angrier, and he tells the old deacon that he should have killed him. This makes Sportcoat upset. He still doesn’t understand why Deems hates him so deeply.

Annoyed with Sportcoat, Deems continues to curse his name. Sportcoat tells Deems he’ll leave in a minute—he just has one more thing he wants to do first. Sportcoat moves to the door and shuts it. Then, he moves toward Deems as though he is about to whisper something to him. Deems tells him to get away, and then Sportcoat grabs the doll pillow and begins to smother Deems with it. Deems struggles for breath, but his air supply is completely cut off, making it impossible for him to fight Sportcoat.

As Sportcoat smothers Deems, he tells him that his father used to do something similar to him as a child, supposedly because it would make him strong. In reality, Sportcoat thinks his father held the pillow over his head because he wanted to wield his power over his child. It reminds Sportcoat of how white men act, although he thinks that black men might act the same way if they held similar positions in society. As Sportcoat says all this to Deems, Deems stops fighting—he’s almost lost consciousness entirely. Noticing this, Sportcoat takes the pillow off Deems’s head and allows him to breath.

The last thing Sportcoat tells Deems is that he might as well die as a young and healthy man rather than as an old man who’s ruined his life. Sportcoat sees a lot of himself in Deems and realizes that the reason he shot him in the first place is because the boy reminded him of a young version of himself. Ultimately, Sportcoat lets Deems live, but he threatens to kill him if he ever sees him again.