But We Do

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta a novel by James Hannaham.  Back Bay Books.  308 pp.  $17.99  *****

There was an aesthetic dilemma about Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta which, as I read the book, seemed insurmountable.  Carlotta herself—who is not quite the narrator (it’s in third person) but whose voice butts in often enough that she might as well be—is hilarious, and quite lovable, if a tad sensitive about her transition (I’ll get to that eventually).  So the book reads like a comedy.  At the same time, her situation is tragic—that’s not too strong a word—and there doesn’t seem to be any way out.  She’s an inmate on parole trying to follow impossible rules, with a family who doesn’t care whether she’s there or not.  How, it seemed to me, could a novel that was so funny all the way through come to a sad and tragic ending, through no fault of the character?  It didn’t seem fair.

James Hannaham solved that dilemma in a way that never occurred to me.  My hat’s off to him.  The ending is, if anything, mildly (or wildly) hopeful.

As the novel opens, Carlotta had been in prison for twenty years for a crime she didn’t commit.  She—who at the time of the crime was a male, named Dustin—had run into her (his) cousin on the way to a party.  All Dustin wanted to do was stop by the liquor store to pick up a bottle.  Just the place his cousin was going!  Unfortunately, his cousin Kaffy was planning to rob the place, a detail he didn’t mention on the way over.  The manager—who, to make things worse, was an old woman—resisted,  Kaffy wound up shooting her, horrifying Dustin, who tried to prevent the shooting by pulling his own gun and pointing it at his cousin.  He carried a gun because everyone in the neighborhood carried a gun; guys who didn’t carry them were called corpses.  The woman didn’t die, but she was disabled for life, and on the store’s security camera, all you could see was two black men holding guns and pointing them in the direction of this woman (though Dustan was actually threatening Kaffy).  Dustin got twenty-two years.  Soon after entering prison he transitioned to being Carlotta.

The novel opens with Carlotta applying for parole, not for the first time.  She only has a year or two left on her sentence, but there are any number of reasons she’d like to get out of that place (and one major one, her boyfriend, that makes her want to stay.  But even he wants her to get out if she can).  Though the hearing doesn’t seem to go well, miracle of miracles, she gets paroled.  She’s a free woman.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and she’s heading back to Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn she’s heading back to, by an odd coincidence, happens to be the neighborhood where my son now lives.  It is also the neighborhood which was once lived in, and has been chronicled by, Jonathan Lethem.  There was a time in Lethem’s lifetime when the place was literally disintegrating around him; houses were unoccupied and becoming uninhabitable.  Gentrification arrived, and the neighborhood rather rapidly changed.  Lethem chronicles all this in a recent New Yorker article.[1]  So Carlotta was coming back to a place she both knew and didn’t know.

She was also coming back to a bunch of people who didn’t know or understand how they felt about her.  Her mother, unfortunately, was demented to the point of insensibility.  Her father wanted nothing to do with a son who had become a daughter.  Carlotta’s ex-wife was not around; his now grown son doesn’t know what to make of him (“Please don’t tell my dawgs,” he says) but has also become an insufferable evangelical Christian, quite condescending.  Her best female friend Doodle is trying, trying, to accept her, really makes the effort, but can’t quite get over the hump (Carlotta, as I’ve said, is understandably sensitive to any slight).  The one person who seems entirely to understand and accept her is her grandmother.  Grandmothers always come through.

The family was one of the few black families who owned and kept their three story brownstone, so now they’re in the middle of all the gentrification, and there’s a huge extended family who occupies the place, including one 400 pound brother who has decided to withdraw from the world and spend his whole life eating and playing video games.  Literally.  Grandma loves him too, and cooks him enough to feed a family.  She also cooks to feed the family.

The problem is that Carlotta has returned on Labor Day weekend, there are parties planned for two days, and the booze is flowing, but one condition of Carlotta’s parole is that she can’t be around alcohol.  She’s supposed to be living in a wholesome place, and this house hardly qualifies.  Her parole officer is a lesbian, sympathetic to what she’s done, but she’s also strict about the rules.  She pays a home visit on the first day and Carlotta is breaking them right and left.

The real reason to read this novel is to encounter Carlotta in her own voice and with her own Carlotta-isms.  I could literally quote from any page in the novel, and just opened it at random.  Here she is talking to her son about how much she’s been looking forward to seeing him (Jasmine is her ex-wife):

“’Hold up.  Jasmine said I didn’t want contact?  She din’t tell you that Ise paying your child support on thirty-three cents an hour?  Oh, fuck that shit.  I bet that’s why she’s not showin her face, cause she knows I would call her lying ass out. . . . The only thing keepin me alive in the joint, was me hopin Ise gonna come back for this moment right here when I seen you.  You din’t get my letters.’

‘Letters?’”

So we’re laughing at her wild verbal expressiveness at the same time that what she’s saying is sad, even harrowing.  That situation reaches its apotheosis when she tells Doodle about her stay in prison, the time she was gang raped, also the repeated assaults of a guard in solitary, a place where Carlotta was supposed to find refuge.  We’re hearing the truth about the prison system at the same time Carlotta is celebrating being out of it.  But the dangers of heading back loom every minute.

I won’t hint at how James Hannaham resolves this dilemma; that would spoil the surprise.  I will just say this is simultaneously one of the saddest and most upbeat novels I’ve read in years.  James Hannaham is a talent to be reckoned with.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/boerum-hill-brooklyn-gentrification-jonathan-lethem