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- [00:01]
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- [00:36]
Rob Franklin
Lemonada Summer in New York Smith, a recent Stanford graduate, is in the city working at a startup. A member of the corporate creative class. Turns out quote poet he learned was not a job, but content strategist was. His Stanford classmates called him a sellout, but he found it a good enough living to have a comfortable life in New York and make the pilgrimage to the Hamptons for summer weekends and hit the clubs wearing designer clothes. Great Black Hope opens on one of these Hampton weekends, specifically Labor Day, when Hampton's police officers descend and arrest Smith for cocaine possession. In the blink of an eye, his life transforms from charmed to a nightmare. He is arrested and arraigned. He finds that in the criminal justice system, his identity as a black man matters much more than any of the other identities he has counted on in the Hamptons, being a well off Ivy League graduate, a privileged young queer man who rubs elbows with the rich and famous. And speaking of rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, this isn't the first jolt that has upended Smith's life recently. His best friend, the daughter of a music legend, had died just a few weeks before of an apparent drug overdose. As he confronts the double whammy of these two shocking events, he's forced to reckon with how much of his life has been walking the narrow tightrope between divisions of race and class. The book progresses from Atlanta to New York as Smith struggles to confront the ripple effects of these tragedies and the ways in which drugs and addiction have insinuated their way not only into his life, but into his communities as well. The book is beautifully written, with vivid, urgent phrases that bring the horrifying cascade of events to life as the opening scenes unfold. This is the first book of author Rob Franklin, and his ability to wrestle with the huge issues of race, class, justice and sexuality, all while bringing characters and settings to life with intimate detail shine in every page. The audiobook is narrated by Justice Smith, a queer black actor whose voice brings Smith to life believably with with real emotion. Despite the heavy themes that Franklin tackles, the book is incredibly readable, mostly because Smith himself is such a likable, real feeling character, and the pace keeps you hooked. A lot unfolds in just the first few scenes, which we're excited to share with you today.
- [03:08]
Justice Smith
For My family one Out East 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 Medellin, cut with amphetamine in Miami and offered to him in Southampton by a boy whom 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, he realized it was really just a restaurant. By the front door at least 50 people huddled, breathing down each other's necks as they shouted names they hoped would capture the doorman's attention, while in the backyard were hundreds more, dozens of tables now shook with the weight of dancing bodies, lit with a 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 at which black tie was optional, and before New York in freshman seminars and frat parties and before that on teen tours or tennis camps where they'd been acne spotted, their original forms intact. 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, six feet and three 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 rained on 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 in khaki polos were not the club security he'd assumed. At first they were. The night bled 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. After he'd handed over $500 cash from an ATM upstairs at the station, they brought him down to be printed, IDed and photographed. They were done in 20 minutes, after which he was handed a paper slip and his things in a plastic bag, then sent back into the wounded night. He called an Uber. On the curb, Smith watched Phosphine's blinker in the darkness, a chorus of cameras flashing. He'd worn in his mugshot a vintage Marnie Gingham shirt, loose fit linen trousers, and a gently startled expression.
- [07:33]
Ad Announcer
This is an ad by BetterHelp. June is Men's Mental Health Month and my guy it's time to talk. Men today face immense pressure to perform, to provide, to keep everything together. So it's no wonder that see 6 million men in the US suffer from depression every year. Men are also less likely to seek therapy than women, which means depression among men often goes under diagnosed. If you're a man and you're feeling the weight of the world, the strongest thing you can do is ask for help. Talk to someone. Anyone. A therapist, a friend, a loved one. Because real strength comes from being honest about what you're carrying and doing something about it. Therapy can help you find your way, and better help makes it easy to start. Take a short online quiz and connect with a qualified therapist from the privacy of home. Every man deserves better. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com hi, I'm Erica Mahoney. You don't know me, but you know a version of my story. Because by now we've all felt the impact of senseless gun violence.
- [08:44]
Justice Smith
I think a stray bullet flew past me, because I hear the it was.
- [08:49]
Ad Announcer
That horrible feeling of dread.
- [08:51]
Justice Smith
Something's wrong.
- [08:52]
Ad Announcer
Four years ago. My dad was killed in a mass shooting. My podcast, Senseless is about moving forward after the unthinkable. Senseless From Lemonada Media Premiering June 17.
- [09:06]
Justice Smith
Chapter 1 Smith awoke in a twin sized bed in an otherwise empty room. For a moment he kept his eyes closed, allowing himself the simple peace of chirping birds warmth. Then the memory of last night settled darkly and he opened them. He had to get out already, through the emerging fog of a hangover, he felt panic slowly filling his lungs. He rose and immediately began tossing his things into an open weekend bag, his swim trunks and linen, the Isherwood he'd neglected. Then the clothes he'd last night worn crumpled in the corner where he'd shed them only hours ago. Arriving home, smith checked his phone. 6:13am Carolyn wouldn't be up for hours, but her grandparents would be rising soon, Ann to muddle paints in her open air studio, Ed to take his cafe creme and recline with a Proust by the pool, and the idea of greeting them with any air, of politesse, of attempting conversation over eggs over easy, filled him with a blood thinning dread. Yes, he had to get out. Toting his suitcase, Smith cracked the door and took a tentative step into the hall, where, through the skylight at center a sunbeam hung. It was silent in the way of all houses large enough to obscure small human sounds. Smith slunk quiet and cattish down the half turned staircase and through an Imsian study, its walls lined with books beyond a wide cream sofa, two emerald ottomans, and through an open window, the just visible crest of a corten steel sculpture made copper by sun. Only after he'd called a car from the porch and watched it wriggle down the narrow stone drive, did he look back on the house, this place where he'd wasted a year's worth of weekends drunk by the pool amid the wafting chat of elder Bohemians cozy in the COVID of other people's wealth. This section of Southampton was not the Southampton of raucous parties, of the real housewives browning to leather beyond the pools of McMansions, but a more modest enclave peopled mainly by artists who'd bought property cheap when such a thing was still possible. Wealth, whispers someone once said, and at this hour was silent. The Audi zoomed mutely under a canopy of fluttering oaks. The only others on the road were two lulu clad mothers pushing prams at an athletic pace. In other houses, people slept. Soon they'd wake in observance of brunch reservations and barbecues, and the whole town would come alive with the spirited hum of the occasion. The last day to wear white. So Smith was unsurprised to find the train platform empty, just a few harried looking financiers in pastel polos moving markets from their cellular phones. The landscape blurred abstractly as the train sped into motion. Smith closed his eyes and tried to think of anything else, but the night returned in smarting flashes. He'd never had so much as a detention in high school, yet now had a felony arrest. It was almost funny, brutally ironic in the way of stories he'd heard about other people but had never had to tell himself. It had happened, though he knew faintly, he could still detect the red abrasions where the cops had cuffed his wrists. Still ebbing was the tobacco rabanne stench of their station, and as if to confirm it wasn't all some illusory dream with the terrified wonder of Dorothy thumbing her ruby slippers, he reached into his pocket to find a folded sheet information for his arraignment in two weeks time. An adrenal rush filled his veins and pulled in his throbbing temples as the train made haste down the length of Long Island. He pictured throwing himself to the tracks like some tragic Russian heroine. It seemed a lesser agony. The news alone would kill his mother on impact. He imagined proving right, a threat of which she tried to warn him. All his life he hadn't listened, sustained instead by pleasing allusions, ones he was ill prepared to break. Suddenly the answer seemed tell no one to pay for a lawyer. He would liquidate his Roth IRA at significant penalty, or he'd represent himself in court, brushing up on legal jargon from reruns of suits. Crazier things had happened. It would be in a matter of weeks, resolved in a quiet way that didn't complicate anyone's idea of him, his promise. The decision curdled the instant he considered the opposite outcome. The billboard lawyer he could likely afford 1, 800 get you off some nitwit who'd rob him blind, then defend him with the approximate prowess of a rabid baboon, more or less guaranteeing conviction. He looked out at the disappearing nowhere towns as the expanse of his life narrowed to a series of parole hearings and rearrests, flesh thinning like fruit from a rotten tree. Outside at Penn Station, the late summer air was dense with the kind of heat that shimmers rising from car hoods with warped paint and refracting off plastic heaps of garbage. But it was evident also in the exhaustion on every passing face. Those left behind in the city of asphalt, concrete, metal. If the news could be trusted, some would collapse from heatstroke in their dank apartments. Others would crowd cooling stations on Convent Ave. But out east, the lucky few who remained would gaze through curtained windows and remark that it was a perfect day for the beach. Despite the weather, Smith couldn't stomach heading back to his apartment, so he stalked the yellow glare of 8th Avenue past the fetish shops and bistros in the Village. In recent weeks he'd found it necessary to roam the streets for hours so that arriving home he was so exhausted, so wrung out and nearly dead that he could slip into a dreamless sleep. On these walks he was careful to route himself away from places of particular meaning. He preferred the blank reaches of outer boroughs, swaths of the city with which he had no association at all but which could still surprise him, sights as simple as the patterned scarf on a woman's head or a particular brand of Parisian cigarette blind into a fugue that disappeared. The day's remainder hours passed this way, days adrift on the brook of memory veering east on Bleecker, subsumed suddenly by a swarm of buttercream fiends. Outside Magnolia, Smith considered the residue of experience, how it accumulated like an inky film around an antique object, a sensation that lately felt freighted. And if that accumulation was already so painful at 25, he wondered what it would be like at 45 or 50. Or if those feelings fade as they were said to, if that would be more unbearable still. A text jolted in his pocket. Carolyn had woken up and finding him gone, texted you left without punctuation, a statement as much as a question, evasive in her way so that any emotion could be read confusion, anger, or both. She was the one snag in his plan to keep things quiet. Already he'd told her about the arrest, well, sort of. Waking her at 4am to weep at the foot of her bed, a confession of gasping inappropriately. He wasn't sure she'd even understood how the night had devolved in her absence, her early departures somehow permitting his narcotic spiral. But she'd held him as he wept, then brought him back to bed and tucked him in with the assurance that they would sort it all out in the morning, as if his were a minor error, a shattered vase. Lately people had been quick to excuse his behavior, whatever it was, whether he got drunk and mean on a Tuesday afternoon or was sullen and remote for days, his friends and colleagues forgave him gamely. Now that he'd been marked by tragedy, though tragedy that seemed the wrong word, at once banal and melodramatic, inapt to describe what felt like a rift, a rupture, a pit into which he'd poured all sorts of stuff, booze and sex and quotations from the Bible, but found blacker and more cavernous Still. He remembered before vividly, but found himself grasping for an after. It had been three weeks and four days since August 8, an otherwise unremarkable Thursday. Just as the manic city woke, joggers circling the parks and workers shuttling in by bridge and tunnel, a girl was found on the banks of the river up near Soundview Park. The waves had licked her clean. Rushed to the hospital by paramedics, she was declared dead on arrival, then identified by a nurse as the daughter of a Neo soul singer, news of which was swiftly relayed to a tabloid that printed it. By noon, Smith had been at work in the middle of an investor meeting when the vibrations began in his pocket. They halted, resumed, then halted, resumed, so insistent it seemed as if the whole world were attempting to reach him. Excusing himself to stumble into a stairwell, he clicked the texted link and watched an image of his best friend render Socialite L England dead at 25 Strangely, Smith's first instinct upon reading the headline had been to refresh the page, as if it were a technical glitch, literally impossible. This girl found many miles from where he'd seen her last hours prior at a party Downtown for her 25th birthday. The calls kept coming and didn't stop for some time. Early reports said it lured in conflicting information. It was cocaine laced with fentanyl. No heroin. She was found alive, no dead. Seeking answers, some friends leapt into action to reconstruct a timeline. Hour by miserable hour, from restaurant to club, puzzled by reports of the anonymous man with whom she'd allegedly left. Headed where and why, they did not know. Sustained by the hope that their search would find her whole, the tabloids would print retractions, apologies. Others had more morbid questions, and one in particular, who had supplied that lethal dose, then left her there to die. Within hours, it seemed that everyone in the city, including and especially strangers, had heard the somber story reprinted in every tabloid and sump of celebrity gossip, mounting pressure on the NYPD to uncover the truth of what happened to the daughter of a music legend, the chief himself declared. They sought to do so swiftly and with discretion, interviewing the disparate characters who appeared in the evening's footage, still extant in Elle's Instagram story. Dinner at Locarno, followed by dancing. There was no time for grief, nor were they exactly suspects. None had records, and all had sent themselves home by the time the doorman said she'd exited the club in the company of an unidentified man. Rather, they were necessary informants, co authors called upon to fill in the gaps not only in the evening's timeline but in her life, her person. It had been a long night as they trickled into the 4th Precinct station, a group who'd gathered not 20 hours prior in utterly opposite circumstances. In lieu of espresso martinis, they were handed bottles of tepid water and led one by one to a windowless room coming out. Some were angry. How dare they be called upon in the throes of early grief to indulge such insensitive questions about her sex life and history with drugs. Others, in shock, were nearly nonverbal. Some had wept in that dim waiting room. But Smith, still suited from his meeting, had answered all of their questions about the years he'd lived with Elle, her personal habits, and the glamorous masses referred to by police as her known associates, with a cool and polish that startled even him. And after being released with the instruction that they might need him, and specifically him, to return as the others headed off to a bar to trade notes or envelop themselves in the shared wound of grief, he had headed home alone. And on the last day of that scorched and merciless summer he took the same route home, through the trash and oil slick downtown, across the river, into Brooklyn's frenzied music. Smith walked until his shirt was rank and floaters filled his eyes, the afterglow of arcs from open hydrants. He scaled the dingy stairs. Moving in. Three years ago, he and Elle hadn't so much decided on an aesthetic as forced their things together in a bright collision of street, salvaged chairs and hand me down luxury. A cracked Hermes ashtray, a print of Warhol's gun. Across the room, her door still stood wide open. He hadn't closed it, he thought, for the same reason he hadn't left the apartment. The room was just as she'd left it, a characteristic disarray of tangled linens and clothing strewn across the floor, as if she'd been in the middle of a task, a sentence, and had been called away. It had the effect of all magical thinking, allowing him to remain in the illusion of before, before the sleepless nights, before the papers and police and patronizing smiles. Before that summer soured to a haze of curdled days through which he'd stumbled, endless and without a destination beyond the quiet of a tattered mind. In an instant, he strode across the room, closed her door, and it was after.
- [25:57]
Rob Franklin
Ready to hear the rest of the story. Visit YourNextListen.com Copyright 2025 by Robert M. Franklin III. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon and Schuster Audio from the audiobook Great Black Hope, a novel read by Justice Smith and Rob Franklin, published by Simon Schuster Audio, a division of Simon Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Your next listen is a production of Lemonada Media and Simon and Schuster Audio. I'm your host, Jackie Danziger. I produce this series with Lizzie Breyer Bowman. Isara Acevez is our associate producer. Bobby Woody is our audio engineer. Music by APM Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax. Production support from Lara Blackman, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman and Lauren Pierce. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Hey, I'm Nicole Norfleet.
- [27:03]
Justice Smith
And I'm Erin Brown and we work at the Minnesota Star Troops and we've.
- [27:07]
Rob Franklin
Got a brand new show called Worth It.
- [27:08]
Justice Smith
Every week we get together with a group of people who know Minnesota inside and out.
- [27:12]
Rob Franklin
We skip the Minnesota Nice and get right to the good stuff. We share the stories and the happenings around the state. Worth your time and your money.
- [27:21]
Justice Smith
Worth it. From the Minnesota Star Tribune and Lemonada.
- [27:24]
Rob Franklin
Media Every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.