Chester Himes (18 page)

Its surface narrative a series of confrontations, understory a series of dreams,
If He Hollers
is, with
The Primitive
, Himes's best structured work. Each morning of the book's five days, Bob Jones wakes from dreaming. Not only do these dreams give local habitation and name to Bob's fears of death, powerlessness, injury, and rejection, they also, like
The Primitive's
newscasts, foreshadow actual events.

* * *

On Monday, Bob dreams that someone gives him a sad-eyed black dog on a wire leash that no one wants. He is interrogated about the killing of a white man and humiliated when, upon asking two other white men for work, they begin to laugh because he doesn't have tools for the job.

Late for work, Bob experiences even the drive there in his '42 Buick Roadster as an exercise in survival. He and his all-black crew need help and since none of the white tackers will work with his crew, Bob is forced to keep asking. Finally a woman, Madge, is assigned but refuses to work for a nigger. Bob calls her a cracker bitch and winds up in the superintendent's office, where he is lectured to by his boss and told that as of next week he'll be demoted back to mechanic, losing his deferment. He finds a crap game to ease his mind and gets knocked out by Johnny Stoddart in a dispute. Bob grabs a knife and goes after Stoddart but at the last moment backs off, deciding he'll wait for a better time.

I wanted to kill him so he'd know I was killing him and in such a way that he'd know he didn't have a chance. I wanted him to feel as scared and powerless and unprotected as I felt every goddamned morning I woke up. I wanted him to know how it felt to die without a chance; how it felt to look death in the face and know it was coming and know there wasn't anything he could do but sit there and take it like I had to take it from Kelly and Hank and Mac and the cracker bitch because nobody was going to help him or stop it or do anything about it at all.
¹⁷

That afternoon he threatens Stoddart with a gun but again pulls back. Just knowing that someday he will kill Stoddart somehow makes everything all right.

I was going to kill him if they hung me for it, I thought pleasantly. A white man, a supreme being. Just the thought of it did something for me; just contemplating it. All the tightness that had been in my body … left me and I felt relaxed, confident, strong. I felt just like I thought a white boy oughta feel; I had never felt so strong in all my life.
¹⁸

Bob reserves a table that night at the best hotel in town for himself and Alice. When the check comes, a note clipped to it reads:
We served you this time but we do not want your patronage in the future
. As they leave, Alice, embarrassed by the scene at the hotel restaurant and furious with Bob, takes the wheel. They're stopped for speeding by two motorcycle cops and have to post cash as bail. Alice then drives them to a house of homosexuals. Bob gets drunk, slaps Alice, hits one of the homosexuals, barely avoids wrecking his car on the way home.

On Tuesday, Bob dreams that he is being beaten by two white peckerwoods while the shipyard president stands by, dressed as an army general, supervising. Bob struggles to wake up but can't. Two older black couples come by and agree that, yes, some boys do get “out of their place” and into trouble.

Hungover, Bob skips work, has a few drinks at a bar in Little Tokyo where a young white girl comes in with two soldiers and starts eyeballing the bar's black patrons. Bob thinks how Madge is just like her, and about heroes from the movies sinking German ships single-handed, going out in glory.

Just a simple nigger bastard, that was me. Never would be a hero. Had a thousand chances every day; a thousand coming up tomorrow. If I could just hang on to one and say, “This is it!” And go out blowing up the white folks like that cat did the Nazis.
¹⁹

Bob decides to go see Alice, with whom he had words earlier. Several of her friends are there and ask Bob what's to be done about conditions in Little Tokyo. He answers in three stages. Initially he suggests that they should simply kill the colored residents of Little Tokyo and eat them, thereby not only solving the race problem but alleviating the meat shortage as well. Next he admits that if he knew any solution for the race problem he'd use it on himself first of all. Finally he claims that “the only solution to the Negro problem is a revolution.” Once they're alone, Alice lectures to Bob, then gives her ultimatum.
²⁰

On Wednesday, Bob dreams that Alice is menaced by a herd of wild pigs in the city park and that he rushes to her aid, pistol in hand. Killed by the pigs, Alice shrinks to doll size as Bob looks on, watched over, himself, by “millions of white women.”

I woke up overcome with a feeling of absolute impotence; I laid there remembering the dream in every detail. Memory of my fight with Alice came back, and then I saw Madge's kidney-shaped mouth, brutal at the edges, spitting out the word “nigger”; and something took a heavy hammer and nailed me to the bed.
²¹

Bob returns to work, where he finds little support among fellow blacks, much celebration among whites at his failure. Foreman Kelly, against Bob all along, tells a baldly racist joke in his presence. Bob tries to confront Madge but winds up withdrawing, tongue-tied. To compensate, he terrifies Johnny Stoddart again.

The white boy came out of it and color came back into his face and it got beet-red. White came back into his soul; I could see it coming back, rage at seeing a nigger threatening him. Now he was ready to die for his race like a patriot, a true believer … And then he lost his nerve.

I smiled at him. “I don't want to fight you,” I told him. “I want to kill you. But right now I'm saving you up.”
²²

That night, in a scene parodying
Native Son
and involving the racial taboo that so intrigued Himes in work and in life, Bob goes to Madge's hotel room and pushes her down on the bed but, as she chatters on about this getting him lynched in Texas and begs him to rape her, he loses nerve and flees. Madge runs after him and tries to get in his car. He speeds away.

On Thursday, Bob dreams that a young white man and a young black man are fighting. The black has a long knife. At first the white seems to be empty-handed, but then Bob sees that he has a penknife. With it he is slashing at the black, opening wound after wound, laughing.

Bob wakes again to a sense of hopelessness, telling himself:
Bob, there never was a nigger who could beat it
.

Negro people had always lived on sufferance, ever since Lincoln gave them their freedom without any bread. I thought of a line I'd read in one of Tolstoy's stories once—“There never had been enough bread and freedom to go around.” When it came to us, we didn't get either one of them. Although Negro people such as
Alice and her class had got enough bread—they'd prospered from it. No matter what had happened to them inside, they hadn't allowed it to destroy them outwardly … They hadn't stopped trying, I gave them that much; they'd kept on trying, always would; but they had recognized their limit—a nigger limit.
²³

He thinks how he learned the same stuff whites learned, all that stuff about liberty, equality, justice, how he'd heard that all his life. “That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they'd been able to scare out.”
²⁴

He decides that Alice is right: hers is the only way. He sets a marriage date with her, vows to return to school, become a lawyer. Back at the plant, he finds himself alone with Madge, who first tries to seduce him, then, hearing others approach, screams that she is being raped. Bob is beaten, hit in the head with a ball-peen hammer, and wakes in the shipyard infirmary to learn that the police are coming for him. He flees in his car but there's no way out. He decides now is the time to kill Stoddart and give them something to hang him for. When he stops at a red light in a white neighborhood, police pull alongside. Finding the pistol in his glove compartment, they arrest him.

On Friday, Bob dreams that he kills Johnny Stoddart but that a Marine sergeant then chases him, bragging how many people he's killed, how many women he's raped, and saying that all his life he's wanted, more than anything else, to kill a black man.

Waking, Bob is taken to judge's chambers where he is lectured to by the shipyard president, then offered a break by the judge: if he joins the armed services and promises to stay away from white women and out of trouble, charges will be dropped. Two Mexicans waiting with him at the police desk asks how he's doing. “I'm still here,” Bob responds. The three of them go up the hill toward the induction center together.

Contemporary reviews of the novel that Himes later said brought him his “only honest audience reactions”
²⁵
were largely complimentary, most of them praising the vividness of Himes's style, many directly addressing the book's strengths and shortcomings.

Herbert Kupferberg in the
New York Herald Tribune
took exception to what he considered Bob Jones's (and, he assumed, the author's) pugnacious racial attitudes while admitting that

Nevertheless, Chester Himes gets across his main point, which is that in a different sort of world the Bob Joneses would be able to lead wholesome and happy lives.
²⁶

“How warping an influence can bitterness and hatred toward white folks be for a Negro?” Henry Tracy asked in
Common Ground
, going on to characterize the novel as “a ruthless analysis of an emotionally unstable Negro whose finer qualities are so quickly blacked out by ungovernable compulsions that no high motive outlasts the contact that evoked it.”
²⁷

Roy Wilkins in
The Crisis
remarked Himes's often brilliant style and offered this summary of the book's intent:

It is a tale of confusion over the race problem and of blind revolt, a revolt that thrashes out against every incident, every idea, every unuttered whisper that would separate, humiliate, and shackle American Negroes on the basis of color.
²⁸

The
American Mercury
also praised the novelist's style, if with a caveat:

Himes's style, though too faithful to that of James M. Cain, is nonetheless effective in defining sharply the inner turmoil of an intelligent Negro [whose] violent mental conflict drives him to the verge of rape and murder … He is left bitter, almost broken.
²⁹

Surprisingly often, in fact, reviews mirrored the novel's own divided heart, which in turn mirrors protagonist Bob Jones's deeply conflicted nature. He wants both to run over whites with his car and to gain their acceptance. He hates everything Madge stands for, even finds her sexually repulsive, yet cannot leave her alone. For Bob Jones, as for Chester Himes, neither rebellion nor measured success, revenge nor accommodation, is satisfactory. As one critic put it, “the book is at war with itself, as is Jones, as is Himes, as is the American Negro.”
³⁰

Calling
If He Hollers
“an impressive failure—with accent on the adjective,”
³¹
Robert Bone agrees, also accenting what he believes a basic structural flaw. The entire book, he notes, proceeds from a
presumption that sanity and stability for Bob Jones will require some form of accommodation; that
this
is what the novel, with its plumbings of psychological depth, its confrontations and drama, will educe. Starting out from bleakness, shut in a cave of racial oppression, Bob Jones climbs through the novel's events, learns, chooses, and seems latterly to have found a clearing for himself—at which point we're confronted with a denouement that seems directly out of his original view of reality, a note from the cave. Having followed Bob's inner conflicts all this way, thinking they mattered, Bone contends, we're now shown they were meaningless, that the world will have its way with Bob Jones irrespective of his striving. In some ways the ending recalls borderline plays opting at their climax for “good theatre”—a flashy visual or dramatic flourish—rather than consistency.

Probably Bone overstates the case here, and what Himes had in mind was more along the line of classical tragedy, tragic flaw, hubris and all, with Bob Jones's dreams serving as chorus. In this respect
If He Hollers
closely resembles
The Primitive
with its tight structure and the relentless fall of its characters; that novel's morning TV newscasts serve the same choruslike purpose as Bob's dreams.

Critic Gerald Houghton has observed that, though set in the city with a nominally free man as protagonist,
If He Hollers
in its dynamics—the pervasiveness of threat, arbitrary authority, pointless violence—shares much with prison novels, giving it an enclosed, shut-down, airless feel.
³²
Interestingly in this regard, Himes himself at one point wrote to Richard Wright of
Cast the First Stone
that “The book is a simple story about life in prison; maybe the boys can stand the truth about life in a state prison better than they can stand the truth about life in the prison of being a Negro in America.”
³³

The novel's bifold nature may result in part from a division in Himes's own mind. At times he appears to intend Bob Jones to be a “normal” or representative black man, other times as someone special. Himes himself felt special all his life, and here as elsewhere, notably in
The Primitive
, directly autobiographical elements inform the narrative. Bob works in a shipyard, as did Himes. His girlfriend has superior work as a social worker, as for a time did Jean. Himes subordinates these elements, though, using them primarily for verisimilitude and for whatever emotional resonance they may lend his telling; he is not yet using these elements, as he will in
The Primitive
, explosively, forcing
them onto and into his story like so many depth charges. Asked in 1985 whether
If He Hollers was
autobiographical, Himes replied: