“Delicious Foods” by James Hannaham

Convincing dialect is hard to write. I’ve been honing the black voices in my novel for years. In DELICIOUS FOODS, James Hannaham writes black dialect so delicious I could eat it with a spoon. I could slurp up his descriptions too. Over and over, I was taken with the poetic rawness of a sentence or a phrase. Hannaham’s writing is scrumptious.

He writes about hard to digest things. Crackheads, derelicts, people who’ve given up on any semblance of a productive life—these are the unfortunates gathered off the streets, lured by promises of job security with benefits and luxuries, only to discover they are chattel, fenced in by the debt they accumulate at their jobs and the drugs they’re fed to keep them coming back for more.

In DELICIOUS FOODS, that horrific life is followed, up close and personal, as nine year old Eddie and his mother, Darlene, recently widowed in a heart wrenching way, become cogs in the wheel of an unscrupulous, abusive business.

The story begins with Eddie grown up. He has no hands. We find out later how and why. He wants to find Darlene, who stayed at the work farm when he escaped. But he also dreads finding his mother, knowing that Scotty, the workers’ name for the crack cocaine that lured and keeps them in indentured servanthood, has messed with Darlene’s head till it might not get right again.

One of the most intriguing things about DELICIOUS FOODS is that Hannaham gives a voice to Scotty, the crack cocaine. Scotty speaks as often to the reader as do Eddie and Darlene. Scotty has his own agenda, and Hannaham does a fine job of showing how Scotty, like any character, believes he’s doing exactly what he should be doing, and has no qualms about doing it.

I loved the voices in this book. I loved the writing. But I was not drawn to find out what happened next, and I tired of the same struggles, the seemingly unending cycles of the day to day hardships and the quests to escape. As I read, I eventually numbed out to the horrors the employees suffered, and wondered if my response mirrored how they, in order to survive, would have to distance themselves from their pain.

I was glad to finally finish DELICIOUS FOODS. It has some great ingredients, but turned out to be too much of a good thing for my palate.