James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods: Folklore, Displacement, and Resistance

James Hannaham deftly weaves folk culture into his 2015 novel Delicious Foods. In it there are bluesmen and Obeah, superstition and legends, birds of death and birds of life, all included as part of the world of the young protagonist Eddie and his troubled mother, Darlene. But Hannaham does not incorporate folklore into the novel only to add depth to the narrative. He also explicitly engages folklore in Delicious Foods to reveal both systemic racial oppressions and individual strategies of survival and resistance. In doing so, he complicates our notions of Southern place and space and interrogates capitalist America’s always-present, never-ending reliance on carceral and other forced labors.

I begin this essay by briefly discussing Delicious Foods and some of its historical contexts to draw attention to the systems that the novel seeks to destabilize, in part through its engagement with folklore. I then move to analyze Hannaham’s use of specific elements of folk culture: the folklore of geography and small things, of conjure and the blues, of ritual and birds. This folk culture allows the characters to engage with and affect the world around them, even while living within overwhelmingly oppressive systems of belief and behavior. I argue that folklore and folk culture serve to bring the known into the unknown, acting as a means by which knowledge is gained outside, even in spite, of formally sanctioned epistemologies. Finally, I suggest that the folklore Hannaham engages reveals what Julius Fleming Jr. calls “time’s constitutive role in the making of transatlantic slavery and its afterlives” (599); that is, folklore makes visible the palimpsest of memory and trauma.

Delicious Foods tells the story of Eddie and Darlene from three alternating narrative points of view. There is a third-person narrator who closely follows Eddie, the young boy who we see grow into adulthood. Then there is an historical third-person voice which looks back at the past of Eddie’s father and, more importantly, his mother Darlene, when they were a young Black couple living in Louisiana in the 1970s. The final narrator speaks in first person, and its name is Scotty. Scotty is the voice of crack, and it speaks with and for Darlene once she becomes addicted to the drug. The novel opens in 1994 (or rather, the year “when some rock star in Seattle had shot himself to death”), as a young-adult Eddie drives to Minneapolis and away from some unnamed place and some unnamed horror. Both of Eddie’s hands have been chopped off, and he suffers unimaginable pain as he searches the city for his aunt, who he hopes will take him in.

The novel has a complicated chronological structure. It moves us back and forth through the two decades prior to Eddie’s dismemberment and escape and then briefly forward several years as he makes a life in Minneapolis. The geographical setting, too, is complex. There are specific places referenced, from Lafayette to Shreveport to the fictional town of Ovis in Louisiana, to Houston and Minneapolis. But most of the action takes place on the Delicious Foods farm, which for the people who live there exists only somewhere in the South. Its specific location is a point of contention, as the workers on the farm are never quite sure whether they are in Florida, Texas, or Louisiana. The “farm” is finally revealed to be situated a little outside of Ruston, Louisiana, in the northern middle section of the state.

We learn through flashbacks that Eddie’s father, Nat, had been the owner of a general store in Ovis, Louisiana, until he was murdered by white supremacists when Eddie was very young. Nat was killed and then burned with his store because of his civil rights work in the community. Nat’s murder sends his wife Darlene into a deep depression, until one day a young white man offers Darlene crack, and she quickly becomes addicted. She moves with Eddie to Houston, where her addiction leads to Eddie’s profound neglect, the small family lives in poverty, and Darlene relies on survival sex work for...