(typewriter chiming) (soft music) - Hi, my name is Rob Franklin, and this is "Great Black Hope."

(soft music) Smith lived this life split between this sort of southern, Black bourgeoisie world of his parents and the downtown New York Club scene.

He was someone who thought that if you speak a certain way and dress a certain way and went to the right schools, everything was going to work out for you, and he comes up against the limits of that illusion.

(soft music) I wanted my first book to be not just, you know, an introduction to my style as a writer, but an introduction to my kind of worldview and background.

And this is a book that contains so many like questions and obsessions that have been on my mind since my teenage years.

- When we start, he makes a mistake.

He gets caught with some cocaine.

- Yes.

- And that starts him on a path into the legal system.

And talk a little bit about why you chose that in particular.

- The idea for the book really started with the character Smith, and I wanted to write a character who had a combination of worlds that he was walking through.

And once I started writing, I really zeroed in on the subject of drug use and addiction.

Really, I think as a way to probe this question of basically Black respectability politics.

And Smith, this character who has been like bred to kind of uphold a sort of generational expectations around like Black excellence essentially.

You know, he's carrying the burden of this kind of phrase great Black hope, in a single night, he threatens that by being ensnared in the criminal justice system.

A dangerous element of like narratives of Black excellence are being regal, being perfect, being flawless in this way that can be, I think, oppressive to the people who kind of try to uphold that label.

- Absolutely.

What an incredible achievement.

Congratulations.

This is just, I'm excited for you.

I think you've got a huge future and I will read anything you write.

- Thank you so much.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm JT Ellison, keep reading.

(soft music) - [Rob] He has such difficulty being vulnerable.

He's a character who is so used to performing himself that he kind of doesn't know himself.