“Code words to say what can’t be said”: James Hannaham Talks to a Writer in Solitary Confinement

James Hannaham’s most recent novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022), opens with Carlotta Mercedes, a Black, Latina trans woman, answering questions at a parole hearing that pulls no punches. A woman on the board asks condescending, “Are you the sort of person who carries a loaded weapon to a birthday party?” and Carlotta is required to have more self-control than most people can muster on a good day. She replies, “At the time, the record states that I was, ma’am, but since I’ve been inside I have done a great deal of work.”

Any other kind of answer will get her denied even though she is wrongly incarcerated, sentenced to the maximum time, raped and brutalized inside. In her head she says to herself, “In Bed-Stuy in them days, there almost wasn’t really no other type of person but one who was holding. Cause the other type was called dead.” The narrative is regularly interrupted by her inner monologue like this, not demarcated in the text, just simply written in her voice.

While there are details about her prison, the story largely focuses on Carlotta’s two days outside—after she’s granted parole and before she’s returned to prison—where she travels to her childhood home in Brooklyn. She hilariously recounts interactions with her self-proclaimed “progressive” Parole Officer who tries to act like her friend (“For what it’s worth, I’m one of the alphabet people too”) a condescending, blonde-haired sales lady at an exorbitantly priced shoe store (who Carlotta calls a “presumed Amanda”), and clerks at an upscale grocery store (“$3.99 for grapes you gon shit tomorrow?”). Walking around her childhood neighborhood, which is so transformed she gets lost repeatedly (“Can’t nothing be in the same place it used to was?”), can’t even diminish her.

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