Book excerpt: "Great Black Hope" by Rob Franklin

Simon & Schuster

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In his debut novel, "Great Black Hope" (to be published June 10 by Simon & Schuster), author Rob Franklin follows a young African American man whose family launched him for success – but after an arrest for drug possession and the death of a close friend, his once-bright future feels anything but guaranteed.

Read an excerpt below.

"Great Black Hope" by Rob Franklin

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Prologue

In the grand scheme of history, it was nothing. A blip, a breath. The time it took Smith to pocket what might have looked like a matchbook or stick of gum to an unwitting child but was, in fact, 0.7 grams of powdered Colombian cocaine — flown in from Medellín, cut with amphetamine in Miami, and offered to him in Southampton by a boy he knew from nights out in the city. 0.7 grams heavier, he loped back through the crush of rhythmless elbows and cloying perfume, which wafted up and dissolved in the damp and sultry night — the very last of summer.

Looking around, it was really just a restaurant. By the front door, at least fifty people huddled, breathing down each other's necks as they shouted the names they hoped would capture the doorman's attention, while in the backyard, hundreds congregated. Dozens of tables now shook with the weight of dancing, bodies alit with the particular mania reserved for the end of East Coast summers, when one becomes aware of the changing season, the coming cold. But for now, it was silk and linen, the expensive musk of strangers. Every face appeared familiar — some because he actually knew them while others only bore a sun-tanned resemblance, the pleasing symmetry of the rich. These were the faces which seemed to populate the whole of his young life: colleagues and one-night stands from the clubs called cool downtown. These faces had appeared at bars, brunches, birthdays, holiday soirees where black tie was optional — and, before New York, in freshman seminars and frat parties and before that, on teen tours or tennis camps with their original forms intact, acne-spotted. And here they'd all come, every one of them, to escape the inhospitable heat of Manhattan and enjoy a seaside breeze.

Picture him, stumbling. 6 feet and 3 inches, he towered like a tree, bark-brown and quietly handsome. Picture him crouched in a corner as he snorts from a key, the metallic taste of his tongue. The night gleamed back into clarity as he steadied himself to return — when out of the crowd, two men emerged, stern eyed and square jawed, barking orders he could barely discern. Calmly, he followed — he didn't wish to make a scene — out through a side exit and onto the street, silent but for the bass of a bop that had reigned the charts all summer.

Here is where the night splits open along its tight-stitched seam. The realization, arriving at a tan vehicle marked Southampton Police, that these men, though not in uniform, were not the club security he'd assumed at first they were. The night bent surreally. Smith watched himself be searched as if from a perch above, watched his limbs grow limp and pliant as they bent behind his back. The rotated view of girls in wedges: their clothes wrong, the stars wrong. Yes, the greater sense was not of shock, but unreality. All of this was staged. A prank, a punk – the actors in the front seat, too handsome to be cops. The men were swift and practiced as they'd bundled him into the back of the car. After he'd handed over five-hundred dollars cash from an ATM upstairs at the station, they took him down to be printed, ID'd, and photographed. They were done in twenty minutes, after which he was handed a slip and his things in a plastic bag, then sent back out into the wounded night. He called an Uber. On the curb, Smith watched phosphenes blinker in the darkness, a chorus of cameras flashing. He'd worn, in his mugshot, a vintage Marni gingham shirt, loose-fit linen trousers, and a gently startled expression.

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"Great Black Hope" by Rob Franklin

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