'Delicious Foods' review by Emily Gough

Image by Emily Gough

Image by Emily Gough

‘After escaping from the farm, Eddie drove through the night. Sometimes he thought he could feel his phantom fingers brushing against his thighs, but above the wrists he now had nothing’ (Hannaham 2015: 3). With opening lines like these, one would be forgiven for believing that James Hannaham’s second novel Delicious Foods is a horror story or a gruesome thriller. It is undeniably dark, desperate, and at times gruelling, but Hannaham’s lyrical prose balances out with satire and humour, and the novel carries an undercurrent of hope which makes even the most intense scenes easier to bear. The narrative is non-linear, and as a result, Hannaham does not reveal how Eddie loses his hands until much later in the book. Instead, he begins by tracing the steps that Eddie and his mother Darlene take on their ill-fated journey to the farm, all whilst grappling with prominent themes of addiction, racism, and slavery that undoubtedly make Delicious Foods a lasting contemporary novel.

Darlene and Eddie do not have a conventional mother and son relationship at any point in the novel, and the true deterioration begins after the death of Eddie’s father Nat, who was killed in retaliation for his attempts to ‘organize and mobilize small-town black folks’ (Hannaham 2015: 61) in the American south when Eddie is only six-years-old. From then, their lives are fraught with pain and hardship, and Darlene is sent tumbling away from Eddie and into the arms of depression and destructive coping mechanisms. One of these mechanisms takes the shape of Hannaham’s most interesting character: crack cocaine. The personified drug introduces themself as Scotty and narrates in the first-person, contrasting the omniscient third-person narrations of Eddie’s chapters and those focusing on Darlene’s past. Scotty’s wit, profane humour, and distinct vernacular gives the reader an intimate view of Darlene’s life and relationship Scotty, whilst hinting at the subduing and controlling nature of drugs, as Scotty claims: ‘can’t nobody else tell [Darlene’s] side of things but Yours Truly’ (Hannaham 2015: 24).

Hannaham describes drugs as being ‘this other entity, this other person, this other thing that seems to be coming between you and the relationship with your friend, or your relative, or your other loved one’ (Cornish 2015). This is certainly true – and quite literal – when regarding the parental dynamic created in Delicious Foods. Eddie soon struggles to communicate with his mother, finding her ‘often some combination of drugged, absent and sleeping’ (Hannaham 2015: 86) which often leaves Eddie to look after himself. Once Darlene starts relying on sex work to fund her rendezvous with Scotty, Eddie looks after her, too, unaware of the ‘cloud of resentment forming’ within him as a result of ‘doing her job’ (Hannaham 2015: 36). This particular instance of drugs ‘coming between’ (Cornish 2015) is interesting because it subverts reader expectations for a drug-related narrative by showing the relationship from the drug’s point of view. Scotty paints themself as something of a substitute partner for Darlene who ‘love[s] her more than her mother ever did’ (Hannaham 2015: 71) and fills the space where ‘Nat’s breath had once spent all that time’ (Hannaham 2015: 205). But Scotty also has a dark side; they can be selfish, impatient and short-tempered, and they hold a power over Darlene that mimics the abusive relationship that people share with drugs: ‘I was hollering and cussing and accusing her of being unfaithful to me[…] I made myself hoarse yelling inside her head[…] You don’t really want to be with me! You don’t love me!’ (Hannaham 2015: 34).

As Scotty’s influence removes Darlene’s autonomy, leaving Scotty to voice her thoughts and experiences instead, it also leads her to the novel’s eponymous farm, and it is here that the reader discovers the allegory for modern-day slavery. Hannaham first encountered the phenomenon in John Bowe’s Nobodies, in which ‘[one] chapter told the story of a black woman in Florida who was essentially enslaved on a farm in 1992’ (Best 2016) and he realised that ‘[slavery] hasn’t gone away. It’s just changed, morphed’ (Best 2016). The ‘pervasive obliviousness’ (Bengel 2016) to slavery in contemporary society is what pushed Hannaham to write Delicious Foods and address ‘one of the most hidden and yet prevalent issues facing the world right now’ (Bengel 2016). The allegorical farm is initially presented as simple ‘honest-to-God work’ (Hannaham 2015: 70) with ‘competitive’ (Hannaham 2015: 67) wages and accommodation, but once the workers arrive at the farm the illusion is quickly torn away.

The company, overseen from a distance by a white man, targets black drug addicts, sex workers, and homeless people, and lures them away to a labour-intensive farm where they are mistreated, abused, and made to sleep in squalor; the deliberate race relations echo Hannaham’s realisation that ‘the legacy of slavery is very much like slavery’ (Best 2016). What the workers do have access to is drugs, which are used as an incentive to stop them from trying to escape but also incurs a debt that is impossible to pay off with their pitiful wages, and yet, in a vindictive, inescapable cycle, the workers are not allowed to leave the farm until they have settled those debts.

In a drug induced haze, Scotty encourages Darlene to take a job at the farm whilst purposefully ignoring the figurative red flags waving overhead, exclaiming ‘Babygirl surrender to yes!’ (Hannaham 2015: 70). Darlene is led by the wrist to exploitation and forced labour, and in his search for his missing mother, Eddie also finds himself toiling in the punishing fields of Delicious Foods.

When the novel was published in 2015, it is reported that in America, ‘27.1 million people were current users of illicit drugs’ (Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, cited in Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); Office of the Surgeon General (US) 2016) and current statistics show that ‘5 million Americans are cocaine users’ (Addiction Centre 2020), which, coupled with the ongoing ‘opioid crisis’ (Wen and Sadeghi 2020) makes Scotty’s narrative presence and connection to the farm all the more sinister. Similarly, the acts of racism in Delicious Foods chillingly draw connections to current affairs such as the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as the hostility and systematic racism detailed in the novel are ‘inescapable’ (Hannaham 2015: 63) and the black community ‘felt that they might be harmed for attempting to better their lives’ (Hannaham 2015: 62). 

Hannaham notes that in the novel ‘things that seemed to have happened in the past are not as divorced from our current situation as we think they are’ (Little, Brown and Company 2015), but it is clear that his words stretch far beyond Delicious Foods, making it an essential book for contemporary readers and serving to highlight the importance of elevating black voices. In the end, despite the bleak and desperate circumstances, Hannaham reminds his readers that whilst suffering will always be a part of life that does not mean we should accept it, and there is always hope for an escape.

Bibliography

Words by Emily Gough

Edited by Sophie Williams

Book reviews, Creative Writing, FalWriting, MA Professional Writing, reviewFalWriting TeamEmily Gough, Falmouth University, creative writing, MA professional writing, reviewComment