On Reimagining The Great Gatsby as a Black American Story

When I first discovered Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt I didn’t feel like the sound was reaching me not through my ears. Rather it was vibrating through my skin. It was visceral, haunting, unsettling… its rhythm pressed forward with a throbbing, seething frustration.

Trent Reznor was still in his twenties at its recording, which made Hurt the kind of single that could unnerve older generations as they held it up as a sign of the brooding aggression of the day’s youth.

And then, years later, at the age of seventy-two and ten months before his death, Johnny Cash released a cover of Hurt. With a voice shaking with stubborn but dwindling life, he gave the world a gentle, profound, heartbreaking version of the single that had people all over the country pressing their hands over their hearts, overcome with a bittersweet melancholy.

Cash didn’t try to duplicate Rezner’s Hurt. Instead, he responded to it, sang it into a different genre, gave it fresh context and added a new layer to the conversation around the original work.

That’s what you call a great cover.

It’s also what I sought to do when I wrote The Great Mann, my 1945, Black reimagining of The Great Gatsby. I set this reimagining in the real, historical Los Angeles neighborhood of Sugar Hill where affluent African American business moguls and movie stars lived in mansions and threw lavish, Gatsbyesque galas.

Readers of The Great Mann will spend time with the actual residents of this rarefied place such as Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Williams and Lena Horne. All of them as attracted to luxury as Jay Gatsby or Daisy Buchannon were.

The Great Mann will now be part of the rich and varied history of retellings of classics. We’ve seen it our music, books, films and plays. In West Side Story Riff dances down the street with his gang declaring, “When you’re a Jet you’re always a Jet…” even though underneath it all, we know he’s really a Capulet.

We recall the themes and characters of our favorite Dickens novels when we read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt even before we’re introduced to a character named Pippa.  We watch with delighted horror as Poe’s haunting genius takes new shape in the television series, The Fall Of The House Of Usher.

And The Great Gatsby? There are few American novels that have inspired so many interpretations in almost every medium one can think of. Some are dazzling but others seem to lack a raison d’étre.  Plugging in slightly different characters, actors or music into the exact same story isn’t enough. The goal can’t just be to capitalize off Fitzgerald’s story—to take on a classic, one must have purpose.

Purpose is what you find in Percival Everett’s James, the groundbreaking retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain was a progressive for his time. With the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he asked his readers to identify with the mischievous Huck and feel affection for his sweetly foolish friend, a runaway slave named Jim.

In James, Percival Everett asks his readers to feel affection for Huck and to understand James. Twain dared to buck the expectations of critics by using the colloquial dialect and slang of those with little education. But Everett reminds us that men like James had to hide their eloquence and learning in order to survive.

James is not an imitation of Twain’s book, nor is it a critique of it. It is a response to it.

With The Great Mann I am, responding to The Great Gatsby. More specifically, I’m responding to four throw away sentences Fitzgerald tucked inside its pages:

As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I though; “anything at all…”

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

Fitzgerald used these wealthy, African Americans described in bestial terms, as a point of humor and as a way of showing how the place his protagonist found himself in was outlandish and preposterous to the point that Black men could be wealthy enough to hire a white driver.

Fitzgerald was a genius, but when it came to race he lacked enlightenment. While visiting Europe in 1921, four years before publishing The Great Gatsby, he wrote a letter to fellow writer Edmund Wilson in which he stated:

The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter…I think it’s a shame that England and American didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks….

I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.

So, he’s not exactly trying to be subtle here. What’s unnerving is that this letter was written in the same year that the affluent African Americans of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street were maimed, slaughtered and stripped of all their possessions by a white mob who found it outlandish and preposterous that Black Americans should live with any kind of luxury at all.

I cannot separate the man from his art. But I can hold love for the art of a deeply flawed man. There are individuals who can be small and cruel in their personal lives only to access their best selves and become grand and wise while in the throes of creative genius. I can condemn one and celebrate the other.

I celebrate Fitzgerald’s art. I am inspired by his genius. With his writing, he demanded we, his readers, grapple with both our attraction and our repulsion to conspicuous displays of wealth. He skillfully explored themes of reinvention, capitalism and the contradictions of the American dream.

But of course, it’s African Americans who have been the engine of this country’s reinvention.  It is African Americans who collectively rejected the roles we were initially assigned by Western Society.

I also can’t think of any community that has had a more complicated relationship with capitalism than Black Americans.

Retellings work when they have purpose. They also must move to their own rhythm and have their own voice.

With The Great Mann I take a piece of little-known Black history and weave it through the structure of one of the world’s best-known stories. By dressing an overlooked community in the dazzling garments of Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel I am doing what I can to make sure they are seen. That’s my purpose.

I am essentially taking a classical symphony and brining it into the genre of soul.

In the end it will be the readers who decided if they can dance to it.

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The Great Mann by Kyra Davis Lurie is available via Crown. Featured image courtesy LA Public Library (Sugar Hill, circa 1950)