Gatsby’s Secret
Read as the story of a passing Black man, "The Great Gatsby" is the great American novel.
“...of all of the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a May 1925 letter to literary critic Edmund Wilson
One fall semester in the late 1990s, Medgar Evers College professor Carlyle V. Thompson was assigned to teach “Introduction to Literature,” obligating him to revisit The Great Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic had, by then, been taught for nearly 75 years as a work in which, unlike the other so-considered great American novels of its time (Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird), race played little explicit role. It was a story of great lies told by lovers and great loves spoiled by lies. It was about economic ambition; a canonical text of the American Dream.
But Thompson saw something more. A pure New Yorker, the child of “middle-class working folks,” he grew up in Harlem and moved to Queens, working for the New York City Transit Authority while taking City College classes from 6 p.m. to 9:20 p.m. on weeknights. “My brothers were more street,“ he recalls. “My salvation and peace of mind … was going to the bookstore.” Eventually, he wrote a dissertation on the history of racial passing in literature while pocketing two master's degrees and a Ph.D. from Columbia and spent a decade working with the African Poetry Theater, studying Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Brooks. His expertise, both book and life-earned, helped him to see what others had missed.
“There are so many Black breadcrumbs scattered through this text that white scholars have ignored or do not want to pay any attention to,” Thompson told me when we spoke several years ago. “The idea of a Black man being so wealthy and romantic is out of their comprehension.”
Narrator Nick Carraway famously opens the novel by recalling guidance provided by his father: “All of the people in this world have not had the advantages that you’ve had.” Next, he introduces Jay Gatsby, a self-made man of unclear origin who hosts extravagant parties on his more than “40-acre” estate, hoping to catch the attention of a former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Gatsby takes place in a time such as ours, inside an America full of disruptive change and white racial anxiety; a time when the Klan became the most powerful force in American politics by stoking fear of immigrants, Jews and Black Americans who’d spent the decades since the war migrating north and at times, in cases in which their skin was light enough, passing within white society. “If we don’t look out, the white race will be utterly submerged,” Daisy’s husband, Tom, an aristocratic purebred, declares in the book’s first scene of significance. “It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
As Nella Larsen would later observe, Tom Buchanan would have known that “appearances (have) a way sometimes of not fitting facts.” And he would have harbored no deeper fear than that a racial imposter would make him a cuckold. “Nowadays, people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white,” he declares later. His nightmare would be a Black man — perhaps one with an altered last name who claimed his family was all dead — infiltrating and defiling his pure white world. Tom Buchanan “saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.”
The device was almost too obvious, Thompson thought. Still, he offered his students a question equal parts prompt and provocation: What race is Jay Gatsby? “He’s white!” came their quick answer. But where, in the text, Thompson asked, was the proof? “And they were stunned,” he recalled decades later. “They could not show me.”
Gatsby’s physical description in the text only provides further grist for the theory that the novel’s title character was not actually white, just attempting to appear so. “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face,” Carraway says in describing Gatsby. “And his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.” The more Thompson read, the more convinced he became that Gatsby was about a man “passing” for white. And so he wrote as much in a 2000 paper, “The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination.” The literary analysis took it as an established fact that Fitzgerald had written a piece of passing literature, placing it alongside staples of the genre including Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. “The narrative constantly whispers the presence of blackness,” Thompson wrote. “Fitzgerald’s extravagant protagonist and antihero Jay Gatsby is the manifestation of his creator’s deep-seated apprehensions concerning miscegenation between blacks and whites…”
A more generous read suggests Gatsby is a satire in which Fitzgerald is mocking his own peer set — Long Island’s limousine liberals. None of them are trustworthy, because all of them are liars. Nick and Jordan Baker, the text suggests, are in denial about their respective sexualities. Daisy is lying about her love affair with Gatsby. Tom is lying about his relationship with Myrtle, and later about who killed her. They are vain and self-aggrandizing, imagining themselves progressive cosmopolitans who are firmly planted on the right side of the racial question. In reality, they are little more than old-fashioned racists, their prejudice barely concealed beneath slick tailored suits and flashy flapper dresses.
They are all “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Gatsby devotes the totality of his being to earning passage into their world and they, in turn, betray him, destroy him, leave him floating dead in his pool, and then go on with their lives. “Fitzgerald illustrates how intrinsically American literature and the American Dream are racial,” Thompson continues. “Because the construction of whiteness [white privilege and white property] and socioeconomic prosperity are often predicated on the elimination of blackness.” They are less explicit than Tom Buchanan, but no less bigoted. In fact, he is the novel’s only character in touch with the reality of who he is. “That fellow had it coming to him,” Buchanan declares after Carraway confronts him about having framed Gatsby for Myrtle’s death. “He threw dust in your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s.”
The response to Thompson’s paper from the literary establishment came swift and unsparing. “The overwhelming response was outrage,” Thompson recalled. The heir to the Scribner family, namesake of Fitzgerald’s publisher, declared the suggestion “ridiculous”. In contrast, Matthew Bruccoli, a leading Fitzgerald scholar, declared that “if Fitzgerald wanted to write about Blacks it wouldn't have taken 75 years to figure it out.” “They don’t want to acknowledge that possibility.” Thompson told me. “But literature,” he continued. “is about possibility.”
A century after the novel’s first publication, we may finally be ready to conjure a Black Gatsby. Today, the Little Mermaid is Black, Spiderman is Afro-Latino, and Beyoncé has a Grammy for Country Album of the Year. We’ve watched Denzel Washington on screen as Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Having seen Wendell Pierce’s Broadway performance of Willy Loman, it's hard to believe that Arthur Miller intended Death of A Salesman as a story about white people. “The play is still, I believe, about the American Dream,” director Miranda Cromwell told the New York Times. “When we see that through the lens of a Black family, we really see how much further away that dream is.”
Such expansion of creative imagination rests downstream of decades of begrudged professional desegregation. A rising generation of Black actors and directors all but ensured new interpretations of long-told stage shows and productions. The century-long rise into formerly exclusively white spaces by Black journalists, writers and academics like Thompson, capable of seeing things that their colleagues can’t or won’t, allows a more complete consideration of art, media and yes, even the great American novels. Once you entertain the possibility that Gatsby is passing, his blackness quickly becomes impossible to unsee.
The first piece of evidence worth examining is not in the book, but rather one of Fitzgerald’s preferred names for it — among the early titles was “Trimalchio in West Egg.”
“Trimalchio” is a character from first-century Roman fiction known, like Gatsby, for the extravagant parties he hosts. Though his name means “the Great King,” Trimalchio was an enslaved child who befriended his master and became his heir before building his own fortune as a wine merchant and trader. Guests at his mansion are treated to pedicures, immaculate meats served on silver, and wine from opulent glasses refilled by singing servants. Trimalchio, in a scarlet robe, lies across a couch and plays checkers on a board on which the pieces have been replaced with gold and silver coins. As the night grows debaucherous, the host demands his guests act out scenes from his funeral as he shows off outfits he’s already purchased for the occasion. “If you have a penny you're worth a penny,” Trimalchio declares. “You are valued for just what you have.”
How differently do we view Gatsby once we know that the inspiration for his character is a former slave returned to prove his worth? Especially given Trimalchio’s speech, which so fully prophesied Gatsby’s motives and motivations: his humanity, his worth, his status in West Egg and his claim to Daisy are all, in Gatsby’s mind, tied to his material possessions. “It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night,” declares the opening of the book’s seventh chapter, the one in which Tom confronts Gatsby, Daisy inadvertently kills her husband's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, and Gatsby waits alone beneath a dark night sky while, inside, the Buchanans hatch the plan to rob him of his life. “And, as obscurely as it began, his career as Trimalchio was over.”
Then there are the breadcrumbs Fitzgerald embedded in the text. The car Gatsby drives is described as big and yellow, the perfect car for a character who is secretly a tragic mulatto. Pulled over by a policeman, Gatsby whips “a white card” out from his wallet, and the officer lets him go on his way. His war experience was earned proudly, in Montenegro. Unlike the many lies he tells about his past, Gatsby has a medal proving he was there. “It’s a novel of ellipses,” explains Janet Savage, who published a book further advancing Thompson’s argument that Gatsby is a passing novel. “It leads you up to the edge of the water, and then you’ve kind of got to jump. But it’s not an unrealistic jump.” When Daisy’s two suitors finally have their in-person confrontation, Buchanan declares that he doesn’t understand how Gatsby made it within a mile of his wife “unless you brought the groceries to the back door.” The last time Carraway visited Gatsby's home, after his death, “on the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick.”
It can’t all, from a writer as deliberate and self-regarding as Fitzgerald, be a coincidence. Can it? At the time, Fitzgerald was, as New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently described him, “a celebrated generational voice, the Sally Rooney of his time.” And Gatsby was to be his greatest work. “I want to write something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned,” Fitzgerald had relayed in a letter to his editor, Max Perkins. “This book will be a consciously artistic achievement…” he added in a later dispatch. At the very least, the novel he produced suggests Fitzgerald seems to have wanted his readers to at least wonder whether Gatsby was Tom Buchanan’s dark nightmare not just literarily, but literally.
“Stumbling on Thompson’s analysis of The Great Gatsby was like finding a door propped open, and I rushed through with questions. What if the novel’s focus on class and ethnic tensions obscures a racial drama that readers have read right over?” Alonzo Vereen wrote in a 2023 essay about how Thompson’s theory of a passing Gatsby changed how he read and taught the text to his students. “...a Black person is skillfully placed in the novel’s foreground. Preoccupied with the obvious clash between old money and new money, we just haven’t seen him, or the threat of miscegenation he represents.”
Then there is the scene, the one that truly convinced Thompson. Gatsby is behind the wheel, speeding toward the city, when Carraway sees something so striking it elicits one of the book's most memorable lines. Here in New York City, “anything can happen” — “...even Gatsby...”
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.
Nothing could be more remarkable in the world of Gatsby than Black men who’d managed to so thoroughly outmaneuver the racial order of the era that they were seated in a town car’s carriage as a subservient white man drove them about. In five words, Carraway captures the totality of the plot: A womanizing husband described as “a brute of a man,” a duplicitous mutt of a paramour and a self-obsessed woman oscillating between them.
Two bucks and a girl. Gatsby, Tom and Daisy.
There is a scene in the most recent movie adaptation, during which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby spends a late night sitting by the water, gazing longingly toward East Egg and his beloved green light, and recounting his life story to Toby McGuire’s Nick Carraway. It’s a vignette resurrected from an early Fitzgerald manuscript titled “Trimalchio.” In response to his editor’s notes, Fitzgerald sprinkled tidbits of Gatsby’s biography and backstory throughout the novel. But in the version he originally wrote, Gatsby remains a full mystery until this scene, on the final night of his life, when he sits confession with his old sport Nick.
He’d been born James Gatz, he explains to Nick, “in indisputable wedlock” to parents “who were very needy and obscure, so much so that he had never really believed that they were his parents at all.” By 16, he had left home and was working as a clam digger and salmon fisher along the south shore of Lake Superior. “His brown hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days,” Fitzgerald writes. After befriending a sailor named Dan Cody, Gatsby traveled to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast and, over the course of five years, around the continent three times. When Cody died, Gatsby went off to war, and five years into his enlistment found himself stationed in Louisville, where he met a young Daisy Kay. “He knew he was a nobody with an irrevealable past and that at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders,” Fitzgerald writes. When he returned to war, Daisy returned to the dating game. “She wanted her life shaped now.” Before long, she was engaged to Tom Buchanan.
Every time I think of Gatsby, I think of this scene. But it’s not DiCaprio who I envision speaking directly to the camera, bridging the space between himself and his viewers. It’s Wentworth Miller. It’s Shemar Moore. Most often, it’s Jesse Williams. In the version that plays out in my head, Gatsby delves into the details we’ve for a century been denied. Gatsby reclaims the pen from Carraway, who has done his best to tell us the tale for a century but, ultimately, has missed the truth.
We know Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz was white. And so his mother, in this version, was a Black woman. Perhaps she passed in labor. Or maybe his parents, recognizing the hue of his skin and the hint of blonde in his hair, decided, at the moment of his birth, that Jay be raised by his white father as a white boy. Is Gatsby’s origin the story of a Black woman who sacrificed her relationship with her son so that he could pursue the type of life she’d herself been denied? Could his choice to abandon the family, and set out on his own, been prompted by the discovery of his past? How did he learn to perform his whiteness and conceal his blackness as he traveled the country and the world? What, if anything, did he tell Daisy about who he really was?
Thompson’s Black Gatsby allows this century-old story to spawn new chapters. But even without such indulgences, the recognition of the blackness already on the page enhances the tale, transforming a great American novel into perhaps The Great American Novel.
In this reading, Gatsby becomes the story of the Black man’s hopeless endeavor to prove his worth in a society constructed atop the premise of his inhumanity. It is the story of a white woman who is liberal enough to take a Black lover but so careless that she costs him his life while she retreats to the comforts of her white world. It is a story in which a rich bigot convinces the poor white man whose wife he’s been sleeping with that it is Gatsby, the shifty Black man who doesn’t belong here, who represents the real threat to them both.
It’s a story as old as America. It is the story of the American Dream. It is the story of America itself: a nation beating on, desperate to reach the kinder shores of the future, borne back ceaselessly into its past.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
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I'm genuinely intrigued by this, so much so that I need to reread Gatsby again, along with Thompson and Savage's work. I'm imagining someone doing another Gatsby film, with a black lead who is light-skinned enough to play a passing black man, and the very idea of it driving the usual suspects to frothing madness.
Not only is this Gatsby a quintessentially American story, the book itself having "passed" for so long is somehow even more quintessentially American.