If He Hollers Let Him Go [Paperback]

Chester B. Himes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1995

This story of a man living every day in fear of his life for simply being black is as powerful today as it was when it was first published in 1947. The novel takes place in the space of four days in the life of Bob Jones, a black man who is constantly plagued by the effects of racism. Living in a society that is drenched in race consciousness has no doubt taken a toll on the way Jones behaves, thinks, and feels, especially when, at the end of his story, he is accused of a brutal crime he did not commit. "One of the most important American writers of the twentieth century ... [a] quirky American genius..."—Walter Mosley, author of Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Devil in a Blue Dress "If He Hollers is an austere and concentrated study of black experience, set in southern California in the early forties."—Independent Publisher

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the decades just prior to the eruption of the American civil rights movement in the late '50s, Chester Himes was one of the most significant African American authors--although today he is less well known than several of his contemporaries. He wrote numerous novels, short stories, essays, and a powerful, searing autobiography, and he did so with an economy of language, a graceful eloquence, and a painful yet unflinching directness.

If He Hollers Let Him Go places Himes in the pantheon of 20th-century novelists. It is an intense and muscular story, with an assembly of characters drawn from virtually every social and economic class present in Southern California in the '40s. The novel takes place over four days in the life of Bob Jones, the only black foreman in a shipyard during World War II. Jones lives in a society literally drenched in race consciousness--every conversation in a bar, every personal relationship, every instruction given on a job site, every casual glance on a sidewalk, every interaction of any kind, no matter how trivial, is imbued with a painful and dangerous meaning. A slight mistake, an unwitting rebellion, an unintentional expression of rage or desire can spell disaster for a black man--a beating over a game of craps, or an arrest, or termination from a job, or an accusation of rape. Jones awakes each day in fear, and lives steeped in fear:

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, shriveled, paralyzed, as if after awhile I'd have to get up and die.

For Jones, there is no escape from the constant drumbeat of race and racism. It invades his dreams, his tiniest aspirations, and his deepest passions. Every attempt to retaliate or defend himself leads only to further trouble, loss, or humiliation. He can never forget who he is or what he is prevented from being. At the same time, he comes across as an actor, a subject, a doer, and not as a hapless, helpless victim. For all that he is confronted with, he never stops planning and acting and moving, and in the end, he survives, though his escape is incomplete and bittersweet.

The very idea that Jones can escape, however, marks a revolution in American literature. Thwarted at nearly every turn, he is nonetheless a powerful, intelligent, complicated agent of his own destiny. This 1945 novel is a compelling read, and Chester Himes deserves to be remembered for far more than Cotton Comes to Harlem and the raft of hard-bitten detective novels with which he made his living. --Andrew Himes

Review

Chester Himes, who died in 1984, is best known as the author of the hard-boiled Harlem detective novels Cotton Comes to Harlem and The Crazy Kill. First published in 1947 in London, If He Hollers is a more austere and concentrated study of black experience, set not in New York but in southern California in the early forties. Himes' prose remains tough and no-nonsense, but it occasionally edges into a tender lyricism, almost despite its general tone of unsentimental realism. This is just one aspect of the contradictions that grip every page.The narrator is Bobjones, a young black crew-leader in a shipyard near Los Angeles. World War 11 is underway and the factories are humming with war-time production. Blacks such asJones are experiencing a new-found authority -roles as supervisors, in order to facilitate the cooperation of black workers in the war-time effort, and decent wages as a result of union efforts. But things are also grim: resentment from whites on the floor at working on the same jobs with "negro boys;" and the vicious baiting of the black men by white females who have the power of a hanging judge by merely alluding to a pass from a black. Himes' main achievement, however, is the psychological profile he paints ofJones in this milieu -strong and proud, the stereotypical "young buck," but nonetheless deeply troubled by notions such as patriotism in a world obsessed by race. Jones' charge toward self-identity -as a worker, as a lover, as a citizen-is confused and at times halted by his welling anger. The white world consistently rebuffs him, reminds him of his "blackness," his vulnerability in a system that excludes him from real participation. His urges to strike out at the establishment on the one hand, and to struggle to understand and control it, on the other, become confused with prospects of sexual triumph over white women, a symbol forJones of What white men view as their most precious, and exclusive, commodity. Jones' girl-friend Alice, from an upper-class black family, ridicules Jones for his reluctance to "assimilate" and become a "good negro. "Jones can only win Alice, she makes it clear, if he lets go of his deep hate of society. The knot which holds Jones pulls even tighter in his unconscious. In a powerful dream sequence he chases after the wildly screaming Alice who is trying to elude attacking animals. When Jones finds her she is "shrunken" and inanimate, no bigger than a doll. When he looks up he sees "millions of white women leaning on a fence ... giving me the most sympathetic smiles I ever saw." Unfortunately, Himes loses his mastery of the tightly wired ambivalence that makes most of his novel so powerful. The book's concluding incident has a simple equation -white evil and black victimization. Such broad strokes, no matter how useful and apt in the abstract, seem an abandonment of an otherwise taut and complex psychological study. Still, the book is a welcome new edition of an important work of American literature. -- From Independent Publisher --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 203 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560250976
• ISBN-13: 978-1560250975
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,124,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finely sustained rage at WWII era racism., March 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go (Paperback)

Himes writes in the style of Charles Bukowsky, but in 1946, telling the story of a black man living in South Central LA and working in the WWII shipyard industry, confronting racist bosses and a white southern borderline-personality seductress/accuser. I had to put this book down a couple times because I was emotionally drained: the rage is sustained and precariously balanced. Walter Mosley must have read this one for background for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, but Himes is far from easy. Himes does not deserve his obscurity

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great American and African American Novel, May 12, 2006

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go: A Novel (Himes, Chester) (Paperback)

This is a great novel of this country and its life, and of African American literature. What it does is take its hero and make him the center of so much evil and so much force, that a fault line is exposed through the rotten heart of American society, particularly as it was during the Second World War when the story is written.

Jones starts out as a fairly "OK" figure, a Black worker who has succeeded in a war time shipyard playing the game square with possessions and an upwardly mobile future and deferment from the War as an essential war worker. Then every force gets set after him, a trashy white woman coworker who flirts and cries rape, the union bureaucrats who are supposed to be defending his rights as a worker but will do anything to keep peace for the war (a depiction in this and other novels that got Himes's the blackball by Communist party supporters in the literary world), of course, the police, the Black middle class represented by his girl friend, and his own fear and self doubt. He seems to be colliding with the whole world unified around "the war effort" and peace at home.

As such, the novel can grip the reader, not just due to its social or historical impact, but because it does the real ideal work of a novel, one character, seeming an average person, set against big forces, struggling for life. It does that well. I will not say any more lest I spoil the experience of this novel for those who need to read it.

Himes has good grit and good realism. Much is said about his association with crime fiction, although when this book was written he had no idea that years latter, he would be so disgusted with the lack of respect he got as an artist and with political black balling he got for writing honestly about the corruption and political sellout of the Black struggle by the Communist party, that Himes would flee the country, end up in Europe and then live by writing mysteries.

I have always thought that this novel and in some of his other literary work as well as the detective novels, Himes showed a superior sense of fundamental accuracy of details and an ability to convey a real world with real details without flooding the reader with description. I am not a big fan of any kind of dectective novels, by Himes work always brings me back to what it was like to be in New York, especially Harlem, in the 1950s. They are remarkable in that they were written by a writer who had not visited the US, let alone Harlem in years.

This is a great novel, a great read, a page turner, and a mind satisfyer. It is sad that it is not more known and appreciated.

You appreciate by getting it and reading it!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indignities and rage of a black shipyard worker during WWII, March 29, 2002

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If He Hollers Let Him Go (Paperback)

Chester Himes's first novel is a vivid portrait of black rage in Los Angeles during World War II, when blacks were able to get shipyard jobs, but had to work with (or for) southern whites who expected deference from those they considered their inferiors (indeed, regarded as subhuman). Himes crammed a lot into 203 pages. I find Bob Jones's dreams and his dialogue with Alice not just didactic, but forced, and the sexual politics is at some points difficult to believe. In contrast, the fury and terror of indignities at work, with the LAPD, with duplicitous white coworkers, union and company officials burn true. In the four days after snapping back at a Texan woman who spits out the n-word, Bob loses his position (and therefore his draft deferment), his middle-class girlfriend, his car, the money in his wallet, his shoes, and his freedom.