James Hannaham

The raucous, irreverent, and harrowing story of a transgender woman's reentry into life on the outside after more than twenty years in prison, over one eventful Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn--from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods. Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a liquor-store robbery gone wrong in her early twenties, she still went by Dustin Chambers, the name she grew up with in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene--before it gentrified. But within a year of going to prison, she took the name Carlotta and transitioned. Prison authorities rejected this embrace of selfhood, and Carlotta served twenty-two years in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away. Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail? Written with the same mischievous verve and astonishing freshness in Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn in a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. The novel sings with brio and ambition, offering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people even after they've been freed.

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

Lindsay

But then the Spirit of Prison Past took over, a thirst for violence caused by the fear of violence. In the joint she always had to leap headfirst into one disaster to avoid a worse disaster.

They bolted down Marcus Garvey Boulevard fast as Marcus Garvey getting kicked out of America

When they say life’s a dream, ain’t that the shit talkin bout? That you know all a what happened to you, an that it’s true, but ev’body else an they dog could come along with they own idea bout who you is, an all they beefs an hates an whatever an say that the shit you know’s true ain’t the truth an that you a fuckin liar an if it’s just you against them, an they got more power than you, even though you tellin the real truth, they gonna get the world to see it like a lie.

Maybe that’s what freedom is, the freedom to waste your fuckin freedom

Ain’t it no place in the world where you could just be who you is, look how you wanna look, fuck who you gonna fuck, an be Black the way you be Black an don’t nobody gotta give you a hard time to the point a kickin yo butt, shootin you, stabbin you, breakin yo neck wit they knee, an hangin yo ass from a goddamn tree? An if that place ain’t Brooklyn, then where the fuckin fuck it at?

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