Anyone who has experienced a summer in New York City understands the magic that radiates through its boroughs.
As simmering rays of sun bounce off the glass of high-rise buildings of the city, a host of bodies traverse the unfolding discoveries of daytime explorations and the marvels of nighttime soirées. And in his debut novel Great Black Hope, writer and professor Rob Franklin perfectly encapsulates the curiosity and possible perils of summer in the Big Apple.
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Great Black Hope centers around Smith, a young Black gay man from an elite family in Atlanta living an upwardly mobile life in New York. But when his friend Elle dies mysteriously and Smith is arrested for drug possession, Smith is launched into a illuminating quest toward a better understanding of his luxuriously complex life and the promise of its future.
Franklin’s intoxicating writing takes readers on a coming-of-age journey tackling race, class, and the legal system, all with New York City’s illustrious nightlife as the backdrop. And Native Son caught up with Franklin to chat about his debut novel, his literary inspirations, and how his passion for people watching influenced his new work.
NATIVE SON: How did your cultural background and your personal experiences help to shape the voice and vision behind this book?
ROB FRANKLIN: There’s so much of me in the character Smith. As I continued writing, I was thinking about the goal of Black respectability politics in my own life and how they had been, in some ways, motivating, but in other ways, very much a hindrance in self-discovery. Then in terms of just developing this story, I was definitely inspired by my family history. I ended up interviewing my grandmother about her life and using a lot of that material to construct the flashback. There’s a flashback with [Smith’s] grandmother’s history of growing up on a sharecropping farm, moving to the urban south, becoming a lawyer, and setting off the family’s generational class ascendancy in motion. But then also looking at the ways in which that has affected the psyches of these different characters and the ways in which an obsessive drive to achieve can become almost like a cancer in a person’s mind.
When I think of Great Black Hope, I instantly think of the phrase “Great White Hope” that was applied to a white boxer hopeful to defeat Black boxer Jack Johnson. With all that considered, how do you see the idea of hope operating within the Black experience, and how does your book explore or complicate that?
I think the title is working on a couple of different levels where there is the phrase the “Great Black Hope” — applied to people, like Barack Obama, who are seen as the future of the race and presented on this pedestal as embodiments of the “talented 10th notion.” I think there’s a lot of baggage and implicit bias dynamics that are embedded into that conversation. There’s all of that association with that phrase.
What were some of your literary inspirations that influenced your writing for Great Black Hope?
I was thinking about [The Great Gatsby], a book that everyone in high school read. I think planted a seed in me. That vision of New York glamour, as well as the elegance of those sentences, has always stuck with me. But then thinking of more literature depicting wealth and class distinctions in New York, the work from the ’80s by Jay McInerny and Brett Easton Ellis. Also a coming-of-age text set in New York with Just Kids by Patti Smith. I was definitely aiming to write one of these books that has a timeless New York quality. It has the dynamism, verve, and looks at class disparities and the sheen of glamour in this city.
But then I also was interested in a slightly heavy sociological analysis of how identity is functioning in these spaces, what intimate relationships across identity lines look like, and how they’re tested by the systems in which they’re formed. For that, I was thinking about works like White Girls by Hilton Als, Negroland by Margo Jefferson, particularly for the just representation of the Black bourgeoisie. Then finally, I think of my literary heroes. James Baldwin is certainly in that camp, as well as a lot of poets, everyone from Richard Siken, to Claudia Rankine, to some contemporary Black queer poets like Saeed Jones and Danez Smith.
Most New Yorkers might understand what it means to be a “nightlife zoologist,” a term you use in the novel to explore “people watching.” Where are the places in the Big Apple where you’ve become a nightlife zoologist?
Early in my time in New York, I was living in Chinatown and going out a lot downtown. A lot of clubs — I’m not even sure they’re still around. But I would go with my friends to Paul’s Baby Grand. Then a place that actually makes it into the book in some fictionalized form is called Chalet. It’s inspired by China Chalet, which was in the Financial District and was a place where you got a mix of celebrities, drag queens, fashion students, that felt like this grand confluence of different types of people in New York. I always really enjoyed the people watching there. Now, I’m not really hitting the club that often. If I’m at a party in somebody’s apartment or for work, I’m still looking at the way that power is functioning in those spaces, how people present themselves, and what the subtext behind that presentation is. I’m always interested in the performances of ourselves that we bring to the public. I think parties are the perfect place to watch that.
What conversations do you hope that the Black queer community has after engaging with your novel?
If you’re a writer with a marginalized identity, writing a character who’s a racial minority or queer, there can be a desire to sanitize certain aspects of their character portrayal. Because we don’t want to air out dirty laundry in public. I wanted to depict Smith as messy. At times, I think even in almost weaponizing his identity, he is making certain missteps or being not loving to some of the people in his life. Anyway, I was really interested in him being this messy character. And I hope that will feel exciting to Black queer readers and will feel like something that everyone is able to do in their work and in their lives — to depict whole selves.
I think that also just plays into that theme of respectability within the novel. Recognizing the hindrance that feeling like we have to adhere to certain public images can be and feeling liberated from that. In the third section of the novel, we see a character named O, who I think is a bit more liberated from those expectations. I almost thought of Smith and O as being two sides of my own psyche. Smith being so representative of my upbringing — of the Black respectability and achievement ideology in which I was raised. And then O representing not feeling in any way constrained by identity. I also think that there’s a sense of possibility in that.
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