Customer Reviews

If He Hollers Let Him Go: A Novel (Himes, Chester)

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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

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!

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.

This book, along with others that for some reason fall into obscurity after a dazzling popularity, really should not be allowed to be forgotten. Himes writing is crisp, clean. His characters are interesting and compelling. We want to see what happens, even when we don't like it. When people ask me what books they ought to read to become well-read, this one is on the list, both for it's literary merit and for the good story it tells.

The rage is justified and the story needed to be told. Like a volcano, Himes had to let it out or go nuts. He was as good as Hemingway (or any of those white cats at the time) and simply was not given the respect because of his skin color.
It's a damn shame. And I'm saying this as a white guy who happens to be color-blind, as they say. Himes did end up moving to Europe where he was better treated.
Lastly, all I can say is once I started reading If He Hollers...
I could not put it down and finished it in two days--my eyes aching and all. If you're looking for the real thing, this is it.
Tough writing is not easy to find these days, writing that's from the gut and is about something... This book has it. Long live Chester Himes.

This is simply one of the great American novels of the 20th century. It always astounds and saddens me that this novel is forgotten in any discussion of African American literature. This book, along with Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart, is essential to understanding the minority experience in America. In addition, Himes portrait of post WWII Los Angeles is as good as anything I've read, including the master, John Fante.

It's 1942 and the country is pulling together in a bid to aid the war effort. Bob Jones is a well-educated black man who has left university to work as a leaderman in a shipbuilding factory. He has a steady girlfriend who comes from an upper middleclass family, a brand new car and good prospects. But he is fighting a daily rage that is being stoked by the constant racism and segregation that was common for the day.

When Bob is demoted after a run-in with a white woman at work he is barely able to control his emotions, imagining all sorts of reprisals. The shame and humiliation mixed with outrage are strong but they are tempered with the fear of consequences should he try to do anything about it.

Chester Himes' first novel is an extremely compelling tale of injustice as Bob's world inevitably falls apart. The helplessness is vividly portrayed as Bob's dreams are continually beaten down for no other reason than the colour of his skin and the urge to fight back is so strong it's palpable.

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.

(Note: Chester Himes is no relation to Andrew Himes.)

"If He Hollers Let Him Go" was perhaps Himes' best book, and places him in the pantheon of American fiction writers of the 20th century. It is an intense and muscular story, with a swath 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, breaking with Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas and pre-figuring African-American literature of the '60s. Thwarted at nearly every turn, Jones 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.

The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

This emotionally charged novel, written by Chester Himes, tells the true locked up feelings of an african american character, that we to this day somewhat, feel the same. Take a journey with Himes thru this novel going thru the likings/dislikes of everyday life. Himes in so many words said things alot of us still feel to this day. He writes from his soul leaving the reader emotionally drained. I love Chester Himes novels, he thinks and writes what most is scared to say or write. I could now see in his time the world was not ready for Chester Himes, but still true today these feelings and thoughts still exist. Chester Himes May U Rest In Peace !!

Set in the 1940's, during WWII, Bob Jones is a black leaderman for a construction crew in a shipyard clearly on edge every minute (the story starts with his anxiety as he awakens in the morning--and this tension and anxiety fills the short novel). He is at war between his idea of who he is and his idea of what/who society thinks he is. As long as society and its treatment of him as a "negro" continues, the war will continue, even when he can see, if only briefly, the benefits of giving up the battle and just accepting things the way they are.

The novel begins with Jones losing his position as leaderman when he slaps a female employee (a southern white woman) who calls him the N word. This is only one in a series of literally hourly insults that Jones feels he must endure and that haunt and torment him until the end of the novel, four days later.

Without cataloguing all the racial insults that Jones has to endure, the novel clearly situates Jones within a context where while progress is being made towards equality, the atmosphere is one of constant and enduring inequality from his employers, the unions, society in general and the individual workers he encounters. Even the black characters add to Jones' feelings of inadequacy, inequality and self-doubt. And, Himes is masterly at enwrapping (entrapping) the reader in the tension, the pain and the agony of Jones' life (it has this rather weird Camus feeling like in The stranger when the hot sun is beating down), like the heat is being raised slowly and inevitably to the boiling point. And what makes it a great book is how well Himes is able to pull the reader into this intensity.

There are hopeful moments that powerfully express the potential for Jones to "cool off", most of these happen in the company of Jones' girlfriend, Stella, a black woman from a wealthy family who can pass as white. She and Jones love one another but have very different perspectives of how to deal with the enduring racism--while both acknowledge it as ever present, their responses are at different ends of the spectrum. Stella spends the entire novel trying to lure Jones to her side and becoming more and more successful.

Without giving away the ending, suffice it to say that Himes is not writing a hopeful novel. As a 21st century reader, we may wonder whether such a novel still has resonance today. . . and the novel is well worth reading not just because the agony that Jones undergoes is one that any oppressed individual may experience but also because the novel is engaging and well written, thoughtful and introspective. It's about race but it's also about pride and humility and humiliation and power and victimization.

A couple of problems I had as a reader: there are some references that were completely alien to me and I literally could not understand them and, while this doesn't affect my ability to follow the novel, I was lost occasionally. Also, the novel is didactic. Jones expresses explicitly what seem to be Himes' own feelings about being a black man in the US in the 1940's. At times these passionate expressions are tiresome and pedantic.