James Hannaham’s second novel, Delicious Foods, explores the emotional costs of modern-day slavery. It’s unfortunate he didn’t have to look far for any current, real-life inspiration. In 2012, the Tampa Bay Times reported a series of scams in Florida, where farm owners and contractors provided African-American men and women with drugs and alcohol on credit, ensuring their forced labor. In 2003, an April issue of The New Yorker featured an excerpt of John Bowe’s Nobodies, a selection from a book that investigates “modern American slave labor” in Florida, Oklahoma, and Saipan. Hannaham has cited Bowe’s work as an inspiration for the novel; the two writers discuss their work and the issues it addresses in a conversation that will appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books next week. In that conversation, Hannaham states:
I started seeing everything on a continuum of labor abuse. It gave me what I’ve been referring to as “temporal dread.” That slavery, for instance, is continuing to happen to the same demographic: the same people, African-Americans, and the same location, the South. I’m going to be quoting that Faulkner chestnut a lot: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And while all of these present-day influences are apparent, there are also elements of a 19th-century slave narrative. In Delicious Foods, there’s the slave-breaker, How, and the white master, Sextus Fusilier. There’s the plantation house that, like all other plantation houses, is large and ordinate enough to have a name. Summerton has a “historical mood”: here, the past unfolds in the present. Current disadvantages among marginalized African-Americans — poverty, drug use, poor access to education — are mixed with those of slavery’s recent past: Darlene is enslaved, now, not by chains but by her need for crack.
Recently, Hannaham spoke on NPR, and BuzzFeed Books Editor Isaac Fitzgerald will interview him this Sunday, March 22, 2015, at 1PM at the Brooklyn Public Library. Reserve tickets here.
This week, Delicious Foods has been included in the New York Posts’ “must read books,” and it has so far received glowing reviews in The Rumpus, The Root, and The Guardian. It has also been recommended by Dave Eggers and Jennifer Egan, whose blurbs, among others, have been collected on Hannaham’s hilarious website.
Delicious Foods is an urgent work, that urgently needs to be read, to be heard.
We’re honored to have a part of it in The Offing.