If He Hollers Let Him Go

The forty years since publication of Chester Himes’s
If He Hollers Let Him Go
have not been kind to this brilliant novel. It was dismissed by some critics as a “protest” novel and exploited by cheap paperback publishers who emphasized the sensational aspects of interracial sex in the book. By the early 1970’s,
If He Hollers Let Him Go
had gone out of print. With this reprint, it is now time to assess Chester Himes’s achievement as a literary diamond, reflecting the harsh truths of black life in America during the 1940’s.

The predominant theme of the novel is racial antagonism. The story is related in the hard-boiled, tough-guy style familiar to students of the detective novel of the 1930’s and 1940’s. It is narrated in the first person by Bob Jones, a young black man working in the defense industry in Los Angeles during World War II. Written at a time when lynching was not uncommon, race intrudes upon Jones’s every thought and action. During the highly compressed four-day period of this story, Jones loses his job, his girl, and his army deferment; he is falsely accused of raping a white woman and that forces him to enlist to avoid jail.

The novel’s white characters are equally obsessed by race, and these feelings are dramatized most memorably by Jones at the close of the second chapter. The scene involves Jones in a harrowing race through the streets of Los Angeles with his white co-workers on their way to work. At last, Jones arrives at the factory, only a few minutes late. Whereupon, the white timekeeper insults him with a racial slur. Jones comments to himself: “white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning.”

Although hostility between the races is pivotal to understanding
If He Hollers
, the novel is also a linguistic tour de force for Himes. His tense, bleak language is reminiscent of the muscular prose of such detective novelists as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and David Goodis. An additional influence on Himes was surely the authors of the Black Mask school of detective novels whom he studied during an earlier seven-year stretch he spent in prison.

Later in his career, Himes would earn money writing numerous potboilers about two Harlem detectives for French publishers. Two of these books (C
otton Comes to Harlem
and
The Crazy Kill
) are once again in print, in the U.S., and others may be found in second-hand bookstores. Read with Himes’s other, more serious novels which appeared after If He Hollers, they demonstrate the constant attraction the roman noir held for him.

As in detective novels of the period, If He Hollers expresses an existential despair. Events overwhelm Bob Jones; the blatant unfairness of the rape charge against him mimics the arbitrary fates of the heroes in many a tough-guy novel. The important difference, however, is that Himes unravels Jones’s fate not in terms of an implacable, unknowable fate, but rather places it directly within the historic fabric of racial antagonisms in America.

A significant parallel between If He Hollers Let Him Go and similar genre novels is also its treatment of violence. Murderous rage lurks beneath every surface. After a dice game, Jones is knocked out by a young white bully. Regaining consciousness and finding most of his winnings gone, Jones determines to seek revenge. When he realizes the homicidal strength of his passion, Jones is filled with sweet feelings of satisfaction and a sense of proprietorship over “his white boy.” Though this fury may reflect a nod towards Richard Wright’s
Native Son
, published six years before, Bob Jones’s character has more in common with the cool, remorseless killers of the detective novel. Its analysis of every nuance and permutation of the racial question, however, elevates
If He Hollers
to a higher artistry. Himes’s scorching prose is softened by his juxtaposition of descriptions of the people and the terrain of Los Angeles in those times. Through Jones’s eyes, we are given a street tour of L.A.‘s bars, restaurants, fast-food joints, and party scenes in nearly photographic detail. The novel is a Baedecker of high and low, white and black Angelino life during the 1940’s.

If He Hollers Let Him Go
is, finally, a concise history of black workers in this important transitional period. The surging demand for labor in a war economy opened new doors to employment for Afro-Americans. Southern blacks migrated to Los Angeles and San Diego in search of work in the munitions and ship-building factories. The saga of these black workers is too little known, and If He Hollers stands as an important document to that neglected story.

This first novel by Chester Himes is an accurate portrait of an important era just before the early stages of integration. If his message seems too bitter, we should remember that America’s dreams of racial equality have yet to be realized. Himes has written a story that must be confronted honestly.

GRAHAM HODGES
New York City, 1985

I dreamed a fellow asked me if I wanted a dog and I said yeah, I’d like to have a dog and he went off and came back with a little black dog with stiff black gold-tipped hair and sad eyes that looked something like a wirehaired terrier. I was standing in front of a streetcar that was just about to start and the fellow led the dog by a piece of heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck and handed me the end of the wire and asked me if I liked the dog. I took the wire and said sure I liked the dog. Then the dog broke loose and ran over to the side of the street trailing the wire behind him and the fellow ran and caught it and brought it back and gave it to me again.

‘About the—’ I began. I wanted to ask him how much it cost because I didn’t have any money.

But he cut me off. ‘Now about the pay. It’ll cost you a dollar and thirty-five cents.’

I said, ‘I haven’t got any money now but I’ll give it to you on Monday.’

‘Sure, that’s all right,’ he said.

I took the dog and got on the streetcar. I liked the little dog; but when I got home nobody else seemed to like it.

Then I turned over and dreamed on the other side.

I was working in a war plant where a white fellow named Frankie Childs had been killed and the police were there trying to find out who did it.

The police lieutenant said, ‘We got to find a big tall man with strong arms, big hands, and a crippled leg.’

So they started calling in the coloured fellows. The first one to be called was a medium-sized, well-built, fast-walking, dark brown man of about thirty-five. He was dressed in a faded blue work shirt and blue denim overall pants tied about the waist with a cord. He came up from the basement and walked straight to the lieutenant and looked him in the eye, standing erect and unflinching.

The lieutenant asked, ‘Can you stand the test?’

‘What test?’ the coloured fellow wanted to know.

‘Can you go up to the third floor and look the dead body of Frankie Childs in the face?’

The coloured fellow said, ‘Frankie Childs! Sure, I can go up and look at that bastard dead or alive.’ He had a fine, scholarly voice, carrying but unmusical. He turned and started up the stairs three at a time. Suddenly I began to laugh.

‘Oh!’ I said to the lieutenant. ‘You gonna keep ‘em running upstairs until you find out what one’s crippled.’ I fell out and rolled all over the floor laughing.

Then I turned over and dreamed on my back.

I was asking two white men for a job. They looked as if they didn’t want to give me the job but didn’t want to say so outright. Instead they asked me if I had my tools. I said I didn’t have any tools but I could do the job. They began laughing at me, scornfully and derisively. One said, ‘He ain’t got no tools,’ and they laughed like hell.

I didn’t mind their not giving me the job, but their laughing at me hurt. I felt small and humiliated and desperate, looking at the two big white men laughing at me.

Suddenly I came awake. For a time I laid there without thought, suspended in a vacancy. There was no meaning to anything; I didn’t even remember having dreamed.

The alarm went off again; I knew then that it had been the alarm that had awakened me. I groped for it blindly, shut it off; I kept my eyes shut tight. But I began feeling scared in spite of hiding from the day. It came along with consciousness. It came into my head first, somewhere back of my closed eyes, moved slowly underneath my skull to the base of my brain, cold and hollow. It seeped down my spine, into my arms, spread through my groin with an almost sexual torture, settled in my stomach like butterfly wings. For a moment I felt torn all loose inside, shrivelled, paralysed, as if after a while I’d have to get up and die.

Every day now I’d been waking up that way, ever since the war began. And since I’d been made a leaderman out at the Atlas Shipyard it was really getting me. Maybe I’d been scared all my life, but I didn’t know about it until after Pearl Harbour. When I came out to Los Angeles in the fall of ‘41, I felt fine about everything. Taller than the average man, six feet two, broad-shouldered, and conceited, I hadn’t a worry. I knew I’d get along. If it had come down to a point where I had to hit a paddy I’d have hit him without any thought. I’d have busted him wide open because he was a paddy and needed busting.

Race was a handicap, sure, I’d reasoned. But hell, I didn’t have to marry it. I went where I wanted and felt good about it. I’d gotten refused back in Cleveland, Ohio, plenty of times. Cleveland wasn’t the land of the free or the home of the brave either. That was one reason why I left there to come to Los Angeles; I knew if I kept on getting refused while white boys were hired from the line behind me I’d hang somebody as sure as hell. But it’d never really gotten me down. Once I threatened to sue a restaurant and got a hundred dollars. I’d even thought about making a business of it. Most times when I got refused I just went somewhere else, put it out of my mind, forgot about it.

They shook that in Los Angeles. It wasn’t being refused employment in the plants so much. When I got here practically the only job a Negro could get was service in the white folks’ kitchens. But it wasn’t that so much. It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job. Most of ‘em didn’t say right out they wouldn’t hire me. They just looked so goddamned startled that I’d even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, ‘I can talk.’ It shook me.

Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I’d seen them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s dark son, that started me to getting scared.

After that it was everything. It was the look in the white people’s faces when I walked down the streets. It was that crazy, wild-eyed, unleashed hatred that the first Jap bomb on Pearl Harbour let loose in a flood. All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore. Every day I had to make one decision a thousand times:
Is it now? Is now the time?

I was the same colour as the Japanese and I couldn t tell the difference. ‘A yeller-bellied Jap’ coulda meant me too. I could always feel race trouble, serious trouble, never more than two feet off. Nobody bothered me. Nobody said a word. But I was tensed every moment to spring.

I carried it as long as I could. I carried my muscle as high as my ears. But I couldn’t keep on carrying it. I lost twenty pounds in two weeks and my hands got to trembling. I was working at the yard then as a mechanic and every time my white leaderman started over toward me I drew up tight inside. I got so the only place I felt safe was in bed asleep.

I was even scared to tell anybody. If I’d gone to a psychiatrist he’d have had me put away. Living every day scared, walled in, locked up. I didn’t feel like fighting any more; I’d take a second thought before I hit a paddy now. I was tired of keeping ready to die every minute; it was too much strain. I had to fight hard enough each day just to keep on living. All I wanted was for the white folks to let me alone; not say anything to me; not even look at me. They could take the goddamned world and go to hell with it.

Suddenly the baby started bawling in the next room and I heard the bed squeak as Ella Mae got up to feed him. I wondered if they knew how well I could hear them through the thin partition. If they did they didn’t let it bother them. I heard Henry mutter sleepily, ‘Goddamnit! Goddamnit!’ Then all I could hear was the sound of the baby sucking greedily, and I thought if they really wanted to give him a break they’d cut his throat and bury him in the back yard before he got old enough to know he was a nigger. Then I was ashamed. Ella Mae loved that baby. If anything happened to him she’d die.

Parts of my dream started coming back and I remembered vaguely about a little black dog with gold-tipped hair, and the police lieutenant looking for a big crippled man who must be coloured. I remembered saying in my dream, ‘Oh, you gonna keep ‘em running upstairs until you find out what one’s crippled.’ Suddenly it struck me as funny, and I began laughing. But right in the middle of the laugh I felt a crazy impulse to cry. I wanted to just lie there and cry.