Delicious Foods: A Conversation Between James Hannaham & Kathryn Cullen-DuPont
James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015) examines the lives of Darlene, her son Eddie, and other human trafficking victims in the United States. The novel explores forced labor and debt bondage, forms of modern slavery that frequently employ false promises of good jobs, and meager pay combined with exorbitant charges for “employee” food, water, and shelter that, together, enslave persons in debt and create the appearance of legally binding arrangements, and—all too often—subject them to armed surveillance, beatings, and threats of murder to prevent escape. The novel’s questioning of love, hope, forgiveness, and the endurance of what we can only call the human spirit is not lost in the bleakness of Hannaham’s subject matter, but rather made all the more urgent by it. The “Delicious Foods” of the title is the name of the novel’s fictional but all-too-real labor-enslavement camp.
Kathryn Cullen-DuPont’s non-fiction Human Trafficking was published in 2009. She spoke with Hannaham about modern slavery, Delicious Foods, and art’s relationship to empathy and activism.
Kathryn Cullen-DuPont: Although it’s more than 200 years since the end of the transatlantic slave trade and almost 70 years since the United Nations declared an official end to world-wide slavery, there are more people enslaved today than at any time in history—an estimated 21 to 36 million people. This slavery is frequently hidden, though, and until recently wasn’t part of the national conversation. When I began writing about human trafficking, I actually had someone look at me and say “What do you know about traffic? You live in Brooklyn and take the subway.” So, I’m curious as to where this entered your consciousness to such a point that you wanted to write about it. And how you came to realize that this is going on all around us.
James Hannaham: I read the excerpt of what became John Bowe’s book, Nobodies, in The New Yorker in 2003, and when Nobodies came out in 2007, I read it and found an account of woman named Joyce Grant, who was enslaved in Florida in 1992.
Throughout the years between 2003 and 2007, I’d been thinking about a way in which I might address the legacy of slavery in a fictional form. I’d taken a class in graduate school called “Cultural Tourism, Slavery Museums, and the Modern Neo-Slavery Novel,” and I read a bunch of really great books. Some of them rather satirical like Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, but also Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Dessa Rose by Shirley Anne Williams and just a bunch—a real slew of great stuff. And then there’s a film called Sankofa in which I think, literally, the protagonist ends up mysteriously transported to slavery times.
But when I read Joyce Grant’s story, I thought, “Oh, wow! It doesn’t have to be a period piece. This is still going on in the present.” The same demographic is experiencing, not exactly the same thing, but a version of it in the same location. And that brought all of this other stuff to mind: “What is time anyway? Are we progressing at all? Are we just in denial about our ability to move forward in some way?” So that kind of set me off on the course.
KCD: One of the distinctions that I’ve seen that raises the biggest question in people’s minds is that today’s enslaved people can seem able to grasp freedom, but don’t choose to. At places like Delicious, the beatings, the enforcements, do exist. But there’s also a way in which someone might seem to enter this of their own free will, and a way in which monetary exchanges can make it seem as if this is a legal contract that the person entered into. And the kind of questions I’ve gotten are, Why did they choose this? or Why don’t they just leave? Those are hard questions to answer in a way that creates understanding.
JH: Yeah. Those were the questions I was struggling to answer in the novel, but I think, because of all the trappings of regular employment, it becomes possible for people to deny that what is happening is actually slavery. And if you’re on drugs, you may become dependent on the place itself, as a means of getting drugs, and you’re more susceptible to that denial and more willing to kind of go with it. I mean, Darlene had this moment in the book where she thinks “Well, this is work. You know, before I was here, I was trying to make it as a prostitute and doing really badly. Now, at least, I have respectable work. I don’t have to sell my body.” It becomes a matter of pride that is—I mean, it’s still messed up but--
KCD: Right, it’s really messed up. I think it’s a big question, and one you examined throughout the book, why people tell so many lies to themselves. There’s a reaction, or dislocation, where Darlene just expresses such rage against her shoes, blaming them for their small part in her husband’s death. And yet in the courthouse, as everyone is leaving and she sees the freed killers, or the people whom we presume are the freed killers, reunited with their families, she refuses to experience that kind of rage and instead smoothes over the lack of justice by thinking “Well, taking them away from their families won’t do anything here.”
JH: The book is to a large degree about power and the way that power is itself the food chain, with power flowing top down rather than the opposite way. So, when Darlene is looking at the shoes, she’s more powerful than the shoes. And it’s the same way that Eddie is more powerful than the roaches he stomps on. So, of course, whoever is next down the food chain, who can take the blame and be abused in a way that the person above them, or entity above them, desires, is just going to get screwed.
KCD: Do you think your characters are aware of that choice? Or is it something that we simply do instinctively, to protect ourselves from having to admit that we don’t have the power to stand there and be who we want to be, if a certain person or power is standing over us?
JH: I think, over time, one learns that there’s a certain time and place to try to actually change. If you’re really in rage over something, you have to choose the moment correctly because if you don’t, you’ll just be back where you started or even in a worse position than before. And I think people know that.
KCD: What about the moments in which somebody in the novel does give into expressions of rage but it’s not really directed at the seeming target of that rage. I’m thinking about when Eddie is ordered to beat an older man, Tuck, who has done nothing but help him, and Eddie’s reluctant compliance becoming increasingly violent and ultimately very damaging.
JH: The power is the fear, playing on him. I’ve read a lot of slave narratives while I was writing this book and that stuff is fairly common.
KCD: Suddenly you’ve been told to hurt somebody that you would have no intention of hurting, and then the activity of hurting takes over. Do you think at that point there’s any consciousness of where you’d really like that violence to be directed? Or do you think it’s a total takeover of, just at that point, instinct . . .
JH: What has to happen to get you through it would be that you might have to kind of psych yourself out, then imagine what you’re actually doing is hurting the people who are making you do it, as opposed to the person that you’re being told to hurt. Then it becomes a little bit—if you can get the person who’s the victim of your beating, or whatever, to acknowledge that this is maybe your motivation, then perhaps you can kind of slip out of it.
So for example, afterward Eddie keeps asking if Tuck is okay to get him to be sort of complicit with this beating and to understand that it was a piece of theater for the higher ups, and not anything that Eddie agreed to do. I think that’s how it worked for him.
KCD: The question I return to, because I get asked about it so often, is culpability if one doesn’t try to escape. We spoke about that question in trafficking generally but you do seem to address this specifically with the characters in your book.
JH: Yeah. There are so many things against you at that point from the geography to the fact that they’ve ripped you out of your context—I mean, that van trip is like a mini Middle Passage or something, right? Even though they get you to do it with your consent sometimes, they don’t tell you where you’re going.
KCD: Right. And what you consent to is not the situation you find yourself in.
JH: But since you consent to something, you may feel there’s no one for you to blame but yourself—and that it’s possible for other people to look at that situation and blame you for it. But having not been in it, I think it’s much easier to imagine your own bravery or your own theoretical bravery than it is to think of how unimaginably frightening it must be, how immobilizing that kind of power is that people can make you think they have over you, and the helplessness with which you may believe yourself to be settled. If you’re already vulnerable, as a person who’s homeless and addicted to drugs or alcohol, or if you’re already in that kind of situation, you think, “Oh, it can’t get worse than this.” But then, it does.
KCD: And finding someone who’s vulnerable is one of the things that traffickers set out to do. And once you’re there—well, there’s that one line in your book, about the crazy danger of escape versus the safe misery of staying, that I think really sums up an awful lot.
JH: Yeah. One of the things that I was trying to make the book do was—I didn’t want people to look at this situation and think that it was so remote from their own lives, just this exotic crazy thing that happened once. I wanted it to connect. I wanted people to look at it and read it and think, “This kind of reminds me of that job I have, that abusive relationship kind of job that I had a while ago.”
I think that one line was kind of right in the way that people get stuck in jobs, in any kind of sector from human trafficking all the way up to the financial sector or whatever. There are ways in which people sort of—I mean without resorting to the cliché of the devil you know—stick with the miserable situation they know because it seems to make sense when the unknown could be worse. It could be better, obviously, but depending on your state and your own ability to change things. You may think that you’re just better off not making a move.
KCD: So then, in addition to wanting this book to be about human trafficking and the history of slavery in this country, did you also hope the book would offer a continuum where people who were not in trafficking conditions would begin to think about their own freedom and whether they were living in that freedom as well as they could?
JH: Well, yeah. It’s sort of the reason that I used the title that I used, right? Because the whole point of it is that, somebody is eating well, somewhere or supposedly, right? Somebody is making a profit off this, and I wanted to bring the phrase “delicious food” into question: delicious for whom?
KCD: Well, I think you did. It’s shocking when Darlene afterwards is exercising and trying to eat a healthy diet. We’ve seen how severely the enslaved workers are punished if they eat even a damaged piece of the fruit they pick, so as a reader, I experienced it as a deeply shocking moment when Darlene actually eats a piece of fruit. And I think that must have been a reaction you intended—for us to experience that in all of its sensory, tactile sense, that she was eating something previously withheld.
JH: Right.
KCD: When we talk about trafficking in its starkest terms, there are the enslaved and those who enjoy what the enslaved persons produce—the end-point consumer of the fruit may not be aware of what he or she is supporting, but they’ve become part of what supports trafficking. But when you instead talk about the person thinking about a job and the possibility that the book could be read more universally in terms of the human condition, trafficking aside, or read as a story of choices about freedom and where we stay stuck and where we don’t—I guess, maybe unfairly, I’d ask a second question. If people are reading it in that way, does it take too much away from the other points I imagine you’re hoping to make, about trafficking in particular?
JH: I would hope not. If anything, that move was designed to increase empathy, so I would hope that that’s what it does. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of this variety of human trafficking as being singular but rather I was thinking that there was this connection to the earlier type of chattel slavery, and I really wanted to confuse time.
From the very beginning that was my intention, to give people the feeling I’d had when I first read Joyce Grant’s story. I was wary of making this a work of activism as opposed to a work of art. I’m excited and happy that one can do activism around the book, but I wasn’t so interested in just hammering home that slavery is bad. You know, the “you should know about this” sort of polemic.
KCD: I have to say you really succeeded. Every one of the characters is so clearly a human being, and that gets us to experience in a way that—well, I’m kind of old fashioned about literature. I think it still ought to help us to imaginatively try to live through somebody else’s experience.
JH: I’m a little old fashioned myself about that kind of thing.
KCD: I think it’s one of the major callings of fiction, really. But the empathy that you hoped you could create in this book, I think you really have. And the other thing that worked well is when you’re saying these people aren’t so different—it’s not that it only happens if you’re unlucky enough to stand over some fault in the earth that’s about to open up. You describe someone in this condition, and then we meet Darlene and find that she’s gone to college.
JH: Right. I can imagine that being a bit stunning if a reader knows nothing about the actuality of modern-day slavery. It’s true that vulnerability that can be considered a risk factor. But nothing else is a preventative factor.
KCD: As long as we both consider ourselves a bit of old fashioned in one regard, I’m going to go a bit off subject and get your opinion about the role of literature, about the idea that creating empathy and the opportunity to imagine yourself in somebody’s experience has a place in this century.
JH: I guess I was just hoping that it would still be true, that it was still a possibility for a novelist to do that kind of thing. I guess I’m less onboard with postmodernism than I thought. I was reading a lot more modernist literature than anything else as I was working. You know, I’ve said this a lot: I like my novelists like I like my signature mid-century populists, and I was kind of going for that mid-century feeling in a certain way.
When the book cover came back, I was really sort of pleased to see that they understood that that was kind of part of the deal, and designed it in a way that makes it look vaguely, almost art deco. I was reading a lot of Faulkner and watching a lot of Intervention while I was writing the book, so I think a lot of that sort of seeped in. And then, every semester [of teaching], I’ll kind of freshen my palate—at the end of every year pretty much, I’d read another Melville book.
KCD: You can’t go wrong there.
JH: Oh, yeah. It’s just really refreshing not to want to edit anything after a whole year of making minor adjustments to everything you’ve read. “Oh, good, I don’t need to think about the commas.”
So, yeah, there’s definitely a Melville influence. There’s actually a section that I refer to as the Benito Cereno section, the one in which Darlene takes over the farm and then, systematically, she’s figured out how she can control Sextus and Elmunda [the owners of the company] without making it too obvious what’s going on. That was deliberately lifted from Benito Cereno.
KCD: It certainly doesn’t seem a bad thing that that doesn’t end up working out. I also have to say, I was happy to think she had a shot at happiness ahead. Can I ask you about your inspiration for Scotty? (The drug that Darlene becomes addicted to is an actual character in the book, speaking to her from inside her head.) He’s a compelling voice throughout the novel.
JH: Well, yes. [Laughter] It doesn’t really have a body.
KCD: Right. [More laughter.]. But he knows about time.
JH: It’s tempting to call him “he.” But one time after I was done with the book, I actually saw Auntie Fee, the woman from Compton who does the sort of Internet cooking show thing?
KCD: Which show?
JH: Auntie Fee is her name. Type it in YouTube. She has all these cooking videos. She talks so much like Scotty. It’s so effective. And I realized after watching her show, I thought, “Oh, everybody, when you grow up in Yonkers, you kind of talk like that.” There’s a lot of women in the neighborhood where I grew up who sounded just like that.
KCD: Well, I may have come to my use of a male pronoun by thinking that Darlene is heterosexual, and Scotty seems quite successful when he woos her as a lover.
JH: What happened was, when I started writing the book, I started writing in close third person for Darlene who, at that time, I thought was going to be someone—a character who’s kind of closer to Scotty. And then at a certain point after that, I decided that Darlene was going to be somebody who had fallen further.
But I was still left with this voice and I wasn’t quite sure what I should do with it because I was enjoying writing in it and I wanted to kind of keep doing it. And then I was left with a question, “Who is this then?” And the answer came to me that it was the drug. And there are a lot of precedents for doing that. It’s kind of a performance thing one might do. By the time I made the decision, I think I was also familiar with Patricia Smith’s book of poems called Blood Dazzler in which the poems are written from the perspective of Hurricane Katrina. I think that was one of the things that made me say, “This is permissible.” And then in experiences that I’ve had with actual people who’ve been on drugs, I felt sometimes that I was speaking to the drug rather than the person. It’s actually more honest to me than to try to tell the story of a drug addict in lucid prose.
KCD: As a readers we’re brought very close to her. We do feel we’re inside of her brain and at the same time there’s a slight remove where we’re actually able to have a little bit of critical space and distance. And we end up fearing for her, as she’s following Scotty’s advice.
JH: Right. And then that was one of the things that made it easier to write the book because so much of the material is such a bummer. I felt like I had to do something so I could get through the writing of it. But then, it also gives me the opportunity at the very end to do something. You know, I was trying to avoid the first person for such a long time, but then it gave me the opportunity at the end, when she gets off drugs, to pull the veil away and show you what Darlene’s potential was, through that section in the first person.
KCD: Yeah. And I think that’s part of what I was trying to get at the beginning when I was talking about your use of language—it’s almost as if Scotty is not the only character created by language. When Darlene does finally speak in the first person, it’s like a fog has lifted, a fever has broken, and you feel like there’s this person who’s been chained by so many things, and you don’t have to tell me that she’s stepping out from that. Language does it. I mean, your writing does it.
JH: Yeah. I was hoping that in that way it would really feel like the shocking thing--
KCD: And when somebody has put down the book, if they felt they wanted to do something by way of activism, or even some small activity, is there something that you would suggest to readers?
JH: The book party that I threw in March was also a benefit for Free the Slaves (www.freetheslaves.net). We raised more than five thousand dollars for that organization. I think there’s actually a low level of awareness out there already, but people don’t realize how widespread the problem is.
KCD: I can imagine that a lot of people are going to turn the last page of this book and want to do something, and they’ll want to do it because they read your book. And they’ll be happy to know that Free the Slaves is an organization whose work you support.
JH: Very much. They have a very comprehensive program. They do everything from rescues to lobbying. It’s kind of amazing, the wide variety of things that they’re involved in.
KCD: The last thing I’d like to ask about—there’s another discomforting question raised by your book. If you look at the history of the abolitionist movement, there’s the idea that slavery isn’t destructive just to the people enslaved, but also destructive to the people on the supposedly beneficial end of it. I don’t think your book echoes this. The characters who own the large house and the slave-staffed business may lose their property, but it’s not as if they come to any realization about what they’ve done or that we feel any of them have suffered as a person because of what they’ve done or by realizing what they’ve done.
JH: Well, maybe that’s a bit more true to life, isn’t it?
KCD: Exactly. Yeah, that’s kind of my sad point, too.
JH: The really frustrating thing is that the sort of end game of the trial in the book is similar to the end game of the Evan’s case[1]: the case in Florida where they couldn’t really get them on human trafficking because there weren’t any laws in place. You know, it was like, “Oh, you’re polluting the river.”
They got them on something, but they didn’t get them on what they wanted to get them on. That’s one of the reasons human trafficking continues to be perpetuated, right? The people get away with it essentially. And if you prosecute them for the wrong thing, then you’re not sending a message, really, or you’re sending the wrong message.
KCD: Yeah, it’s sending the wrong message, but your book is getting a lot of attention and, hopefully, that will raise the conversation and help improve things.
JH: I hope so.
__________
[1] U.S. vs. Ronald Evans, 2007, a case begun with the rescue of people enslaved in agribusiness labor camps in Palatka, Florida and Newton Grove, North Carolina.
James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015) examines the lives of Darlene, her son Eddie, and other human trafficking victims in the United States. The novel explores forced labor and debt bondage, forms of modern slavery that frequently employ false promises of good jobs, and meager pay combined with exorbitant charges for “employee” food, water, and shelter that, together, enslave persons in debt and create the appearance of legally binding arrangements, and—all too often—subject them to armed surveillance, beatings, and threats of murder to prevent escape. The novel’s questioning of love, hope, forgiveness, and the endurance of what we can only call the human spirit is not lost in the bleakness of Hannaham’s subject matter, but rather made all the more urgent by it. The “Delicious Foods” of the title is the name of the novel’s fictional but all-too-real labor-enslavement camp.
Kathryn Cullen-DuPont’s non-fiction Human Trafficking was published in 2009. She spoke with Hannaham about modern slavery, Delicious Foods, and art’s relationship to empathy and activism.
Kathryn Cullen-DuPont: Although it’s more than 200 years since the end of the transatlantic slave trade and almost 70 years since the United Nations declared an official end to world-wide slavery, there are more people enslaved today than at any time in history—an estimated 21 to 36 million people. This slavery is frequently hidden, though, and until recently wasn’t part of the national conversation. When I began writing about human trafficking, I actually had someone look at me and say “What do you know about traffic? You live in Brooklyn and take the subway.” So, I’m curious as to where this entered your consciousness to such a point that you wanted to write about it. And how you came to realize that this is going on all around us.
James Hannaham: I read the excerpt of what became John Bowe’s book, Nobodies, in The New Yorker in 2003, and when Nobodies came out in 2007, I read it and found an account of woman named Joyce Grant, who was enslaved in Florida in 1992.
Throughout the years between 2003 and 2007, I’d been thinking about a way in which I might address the legacy of slavery in a fictional form. I’d taken a class in graduate school called “Cultural Tourism, Slavery Museums, and the Modern Neo-Slavery Novel,” and I read a bunch of really great books. Some of them rather satirical like Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, but also Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Dessa Rose by Shirley Anne Williams and just a bunch—a real slew of great stuff. And then there’s a film called Sankofa in which I think, literally, the protagonist ends up mysteriously transported to slavery times.
But when I read Joyce Grant’s story, I thought, “Oh, wow! It doesn’t have to be a period piece. This is still going on in the present.” The same demographic is experiencing, not exactly the same thing, but a version of it in the same location. And that brought all of this other stuff to mind: “What is time anyway? Are we progressing at all? Are we just in denial about our ability to move forward in some way?” So that kind of set me off on the course.
KCD: One of the distinctions that I’ve seen that raises the biggest question in people’s minds is that today’s enslaved people can seem able to grasp freedom, but don’t choose to. At places like Delicious, the beatings, the enforcements, do exist. But there’s also a way in which someone might seem to enter this of their own free will, and a way in which monetary exchanges can make it seem as if this is a legal contract that the person entered into. And the kind of questions I’ve gotten are, Why did they choose this? or Why don’t they just leave? Those are hard questions to answer in a way that creates understanding.
JH: Yeah. Those were the questions I was struggling to answer in the novel, but I think, because of all the trappings of regular employment, it becomes possible for people to deny that what is happening is actually slavery. And if you’re on drugs, you may become dependent on the place itself, as a means of getting drugs, and you’re more susceptible to that denial and more willing to kind of go with it. I mean, Darlene had this moment in the book where she thinks “Well, this is work. You know, before I was here, I was trying to make it as a prostitute and doing really badly. Now, at least, I have respectable work. I don’t have to sell my body.” It becomes a matter of pride that is—I mean, it’s still messed up but--
KCD: Right, it’s really messed up. I think it’s a big question, and one you examined throughout the book, why people tell so many lies to themselves. There’s a reaction, or dislocation, where Darlene just expresses such rage against her shoes, blaming them for their small part in her husband’s death. And yet in the courthouse, as everyone is leaving and she sees the freed killers, or the people whom we presume are the freed killers, reunited with their families, she refuses to experience that kind of rage and instead smoothes over the lack of justice by thinking “Well, taking them away from their families won’t do anything here.”
JH: The book is to a large degree about power and the way that power is itself the food chain, with power flowing top down rather than the opposite way. So, when Darlene is looking at the shoes, she’s more powerful than the shoes. And it’s the same way that Eddie is more powerful than the roaches he stomps on. So, of course, whoever is next down the food chain, who can take the blame and be abused in a way that the person above them, or entity above them, desires, is just going to get screwed.
KCD: Do you think your characters are aware of that choice? Or is it something that we simply do instinctively, to protect ourselves from having to admit that we don’t have the power to stand there and be who we want to be, if a certain person or power is standing over us?
JH: I think, over time, one learns that there’s a certain time and place to try to actually change. If you’re really in rage over something, you have to choose the moment correctly because if you don’t, you’ll just be back where you started or even in a worse position than before. And I think people know that.
KCD: What about the moments in which somebody in the novel does give into expressions of rage but it’s not really directed at the seeming target of that rage. I’m thinking about when Eddie is ordered to beat an older man, Tuck, who has done nothing but help him, and Eddie’s reluctant compliance becoming increasingly violent and ultimately very damaging.
JH: The power is the fear, playing on him. I’ve read a lot of slave narratives while I was writing this book and that stuff is fairly common.
KCD: Suddenly you’ve been told to hurt somebody that you would have no intention of hurting, and then the activity of hurting takes over. Do you think at that point there’s any consciousness of where you’d really like that violence to be directed? Or do you think it’s a total takeover of, just at that point, instinct . . .
JH: What has to happen to get you through it would be that you might have to kind of psych yourself out, then imagine what you’re actually doing is hurting the people who are making you do it, as opposed to the person that you’re being told to hurt. Then it becomes a little bit—if you can get the person who’s the victim of your beating, or whatever, to acknowledge that this is maybe your motivation, then perhaps you can kind of slip out of it.
So for example, afterward Eddie keeps asking if Tuck is okay to get him to be sort of complicit with this beating and to understand that it was a piece of theater for the higher ups, and not anything that Eddie agreed to do. I think that’s how it worked for him.
KCD: The question I return to, because I get asked about it so often, is culpability if one doesn’t try to escape. We spoke about that question in trafficking generally but you do seem to address this specifically with the characters in your book.
JH: Yeah. There are so many things against you at that point from the geography to the fact that they’ve ripped you out of your context—I mean, that van trip is like a mini Middle Passage or something, right? Even though they get you to do it with your consent sometimes, they don’t tell you where you’re going.
KCD: Right. And what you consent to is not the situation you find yourself in.
JH: But since you consent to something, you may feel there’s no one for you to blame but yourself—and that it’s possible for other people to look at that situation and blame you for it. But having not been in it, I think it’s much easier to imagine your own bravery or your own theoretical bravery than it is to think of how unimaginably frightening it must be, how immobilizing that kind of power is that people can make you think they have over you, and the helplessness with which you may believe yourself to be settled. If you’re already vulnerable, as a person who’s homeless and addicted to drugs or alcohol, or if you’re already in that kind of situation, you think, “Oh, it can’t get worse than this.” But then, it does.
KCD: And finding someone who’s vulnerable is one of the things that traffickers set out to do. And once you’re there—well, there’s that one line in your book, about the crazy danger of escape versus the safe misery of staying, that I think really sums up an awful lot.
JH: Yeah. One of the things that I was trying to make the book do was—I didn’t want people to look at this situation and think that it was so remote from their own lives, just this exotic crazy thing that happened once. I wanted it to connect. I wanted people to look at it and read it and think, “This kind of reminds me of that job I have, that abusive relationship kind of job that I had a while ago.”
I think that one line was kind of right in the way that people get stuck in jobs, in any kind of sector from human trafficking all the way up to the financial sector or whatever. There are ways in which people sort of—I mean without resorting to the cliché of the devil you know—stick with the miserable situation they know because it seems to make sense when the unknown could be worse. It could be better, obviously, but depending on your state and your own ability to change things. You may think that you’re just better off not making a move.
KCD: So then, in addition to wanting this book to be about human trafficking and the history of slavery in this country, did you also hope the book would offer a continuum where people who were not in trafficking conditions would begin to think about their own freedom and whether they were living in that freedom as well as they could?
JH: Well, yeah. It’s sort of the reason that I used the title that I used, right? Because the whole point of it is that, somebody is eating well, somewhere or supposedly, right? Somebody is making a profit off this, and I wanted to bring the phrase “delicious food” into question: delicious for whom?
KCD: Well, I think you did. It’s shocking when Darlene afterwards is exercising and trying to eat a healthy diet. We’ve seen how severely the enslaved workers are punished if they eat even a damaged piece of the fruit they pick, so as a reader, I experienced it as a deeply shocking moment when Darlene actually eats a piece of fruit. And I think that must have been a reaction you intended—for us to experience that in all of its sensory, tactile sense, that she was eating something previously withheld.
JH: Right.
KCD: When we talk about trafficking in its starkest terms, there are the enslaved and those who enjoy what the enslaved persons produce—the end-point consumer of the fruit may not be aware of what he or she is supporting, but they’ve become part of what supports trafficking. But when you instead talk about the person thinking about a job and the possibility that the book could be read more universally in terms of the human condition, trafficking aside, or read as a story of choices about freedom and where we stay stuck and where we don’t—I guess, maybe unfairly, I’d ask a second question. If people are reading it in that way, does it take too much away from the other points I imagine you’re hoping to make, about trafficking in particular?
JH: I would hope not. If anything, that move was designed to increase empathy, so I would hope that that’s what it does. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of this variety of human trafficking as being singular but rather I was thinking that there was this connection to the earlier type of chattel slavery, and I really wanted to confuse time.
From the very beginning that was my intention, to give people the feeling I’d had when I first read Joyce Grant’s story. I was wary of making this a work of activism as opposed to a work of art. I’m excited and happy that one can do activism around the book, but I wasn’t so interested in just hammering home that slavery is bad. You know, the “you should know about this” sort of polemic.
KCD: I have to say you really succeeded. Every one of the characters is so clearly a human being, and that gets us to experience in a way that—well, I’m kind of old fashioned about literature. I think it still ought to help us to imaginatively try to live through somebody else’s experience.
JH: I’m a little old fashioned myself about that kind of thing.
KCD: I think it’s one of the major callings of fiction, really. But the empathy that you hoped you could create in this book, I think you really have. And the other thing that worked well is when you’re saying these people aren’t so different—it’s not that it only happens if you’re unlucky enough to stand over some fault in the earth that’s about to open up. You describe someone in this condition, and then we meet Darlene and find that she’s gone to college.
JH: Right. I can imagine that being a bit stunning if a reader knows nothing about the actuality of modern-day slavery. It’s true that vulnerability that can be considered a risk factor. But nothing else is a preventative factor.
KCD: As long as we both consider ourselves a bit of old fashioned in one regard, I’m going to go a bit off subject and get your opinion about the role of literature, about the idea that creating empathy and the opportunity to imagine yourself in somebody’s experience has a place in this century.
JH: I guess I was just hoping that it would still be true, that it was still a possibility for a novelist to do that kind of thing. I guess I’m less onboard with postmodernism than I thought. I was reading a lot more modernist literature than anything else as I was working. You know, I’ve said this a lot: I like my novelists like I like my signature mid-century populists, and I was kind of going for that mid-century feeling in a certain way.
When the book cover came back, I was really sort of pleased to see that they understood that that was kind of part of the deal, and designed it in a way that makes it look vaguely, almost art deco. I was reading a lot of Faulkner and watching a lot of Intervention while I was writing the book, so I think a lot of that sort of seeped in. And then, every semester [of teaching], I’ll kind of freshen my palate—at the end of every year pretty much, I’d read another Melville book.
KCD: You can’t go wrong there.
JH: Oh, yeah. It’s just really refreshing not to want to edit anything after a whole year of making minor adjustments to everything you’ve read. “Oh, good, I don’t need to think about the commas.”
So, yeah, there’s definitely a Melville influence. There’s actually a section that I refer to as the Benito Cereno section, the one in which Darlene takes over the farm and then, systematically, she’s figured out how she can control Sextus and Elmunda [the owners of the company] without making it too obvious what’s going on. That was deliberately lifted from Benito Cereno.
KCD: It certainly doesn’t seem a bad thing that that doesn’t end up working out. I also have to say, I was happy to think she had a shot at happiness ahead. Can I ask you about your inspiration for Scotty? (The drug that Darlene becomes addicted to is an actual character in the book, speaking to her from inside her head.) He’s a compelling voice throughout the novel.
JH: Well, yes. [Laughter] It doesn’t really have a body.
KCD: Right. [More laughter.]. But he knows about time.
JH: It’s tempting to call him “he.” But one time after I was done with the book, I actually saw Auntie Fee, the woman from Compton who does the sort of Internet cooking show thing?
KCD: Which show?
JH: Auntie Fee is her name. Type it in YouTube. She has all these cooking videos. She talks so much like Scotty. It’s so effective. And I realized after watching her show, I thought, “Oh, everybody, when you grow up in Yonkers, you kind of talk like that.” There’s a lot of women in the neighborhood where I grew up who sounded just like that.
KCD: Well, I may have come to my use of a male pronoun by thinking that Darlene is heterosexual, and Scotty seems quite successful when he woos her as a lover.
JH: What happened was, when I started writing the book, I started writing in close third person for Darlene who, at that time, I thought was going to be someone—a character who’s kind of closer to Scotty. And then at a certain point after that, I decided that Darlene was going to be somebody who had fallen further.
But I was still left with this voice and I wasn’t quite sure what I should do with it because I was enjoying writing in it and I wanted to kind of keep doing it. And then I was left with a question, “Who is this then?” And the answer came to me that it was the drug. And there are a lot of precedents for doing that. It’s kind of a performance thing one might do. By the time I made the decision, I think I was also familiar with Patricia Smith’s book of poems called Blood Dazzler in which the poems are written from the perspective of Hurricane Katrina. I think that was one of the things that made me say, “This is permissible.” And then in experiences that I’ve had with actual people who’ve been on drugs, I felt sometimes that I was speaking to the drug rather than the person. It’s actually more honest to me than to try to tell the story of a drug addict in lucid prose.
KCD: As a readers we’re brought very close to her. We do feel we’re inside of her brain and at the same time there’s a slight remove where we’re actually able to have a little bit of critical space and distance. And we end up fearing for her, as she’s following Scotty’s advice.
JH: Right. And then that was one of the things that made it easier to write the book because so much of the material is such a bummer. I felt like I had to do something so I could get through the writing of it. But then, it also gives me the opportunity at the very end to do something. You know, I was trying to avoid the first person for such a long time, but then it gave me the opportunity at the end, when she gets off drugs, to pull the veil away and show you what Darlene’s potential was, through that section in the first person.
KCD: Yeah. And I think that’s part of what I was trying to get at the beginning when I was talking about your use of language—it’s almost as if Scotty is not the only character created by language. When Darlene does finally speak in the first person, it’s like a fog has lifted, a fever has broken, and you feel like there’s this person who’s been chained by so many things, and you don’t have to tell me that she’s stepping out from that. Language does it. I mean, your writing does it.
JH: Yeah. I was hoping that in that way it would really feel like the shocking thing--
KCD: And when somebody has put down the book, if they felt they wanted to do something by way of activism, or even some small activity, is there something that you would suggest to readers?
JH: The book party that I threw in March was also a benefit for Free the Slaves (www.freetheslaves.net). We raised more than five thousand dollars for that organization. I think there’s actually a low level of awareness out there already, but people don’t realize how widespread the problem is.
KCD: I can imagine that a lot of people are going to turn the last page of this book and want to do something, and they’ll want to do it because they read your book. And they’ll be happy to know that Free the Slaves is an organization whose work you support.
JH: Very much. They have a very comprehensive program. They do everything from rescues to lobbying. It’s kind of amazing, the wide variety of things that they’re involved in.
KCD: The last thing I’d like to ask about—there’s another discomforting question raised by your book. If you look at the history of the abolitionist movement, there’s the idea that slavery isn’t destructive just to the people enslaved, but also destructive to the people on the supposedly beneficial end of it. I don’t think your book echoes this. The characters who own the large house and the slave-staffed business may lose their property, but it’s not as if they come to any realization about what they’ve done or that we feel any of them have suffered as a person because of what they’ve done or by realizing what they’ve done.
JH: Well, maybe that’s a bit more true to life, isn’t it?
KCD: Exactly. Yeah, that’s kind of my sad point, too.
JH: The really frustrating thing is that the sort of end game of the trial in the book is similar to the end game of the Evan’s case[1]: the case in Florida where they couldn’t really get them on human trafficking because there weren’t any laws in place. You know, it was like, “Oh, you’re polluting the river.”
They got them on something, but they didn’t get them on what they wanted to get them on. That’s one of the reasons human trafficking continues to be perpetuated, right? The people get away with it essentially. And if you prosecute them for the wrong thing, then you’re not sending a message, really, or you’re sending the wrong message.
KCD: Yeah, it’s sending the wrong message, but your book is getting a lot of attention and, hopefully, that will raise the conversation and help improve things.
JH: I hope so.
__________
[1] U.S. vs. Ronald Evans, 2007, a case begun with the rescue of people enslaved in agribusiness labor camps in Palatka, Florida and Newton Grove, North Carolina.