62 pages • 2 hours read
Chester HimesIf He Hollers Let Him Go
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, racism, misogyny, and anti-gay bias. The guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word, which Himes uses to highlight and critique racism in the USA.
Chapter 1 begins with the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Robert “Bob” Jones, summarizing three dreams he is having. Each dream involves a tense encounter with white men. In one dream, a man gives Bob a dog, but Bob cannot pay for it; in the second dream, white cops interrogate Black workers about the alleged murder of their white co-worker; and in the third dream, Bob asks a couple of white men for a job, but they laugh at him and refuse because he does not own any tools.
Bob awakens and does not immediately remember his dreams, instead thinking that “there [is] no meaning to anything” (6). The intense race trouble in Los Angeles since the beginning of World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor has caused Bob to feel overwhelming fear when he wakes up every morning. Though Bob managed to get a job as a leaderman—also known as a subforeman—at the Atlas Shipyard, he has observed Japanese people and Black people being refused decent work in LA since Pearl Harbor. However, before moving to LA from Ohio in the fall of 1941, Bob was not aware of being scared. He felt strong: He was big, tall, and unafraid of any man. Since moving to LA, Bob has lost weight, has taken to “trembling,” and only feels safe at home in his bed. Beginning to remember snippets of his dreams, Bob realizes that all he wants is for the white people to leave him alone.
Bob shares his cottage with a family, the Browns, and hears their baby crying. He is ashamed to find himself thinking that the baby would be better off dying before he realizes that he is Black in a racist society. Hearing Ella Mae Brown, the mother, waking up to take care of the baby prompts Bob to think about the women he has been with. He has been with Ella Mae when her husband is gone. He has been with Susie, a woman he occasionally gets drunk and skips work with, and Alice, a wealthy, educated doctor’s daughter. Bob is proud to be with and be seen with Alice, by white and Black folks alike. The thought prompts a bout of jealousy as Bob remembers that Alice broke a date with him the night before. He finally gets up and goes to the kitchen to distract himself. Bob makes a pass at Ella Mae while she makes him coffee, but she urges him to get dressed so he will not be late for work at the shipyard. Bob feels a bit stronger as he puts on his iron-toed boots and tin hat, gaining back a bit of swagger. Gathering his belongings, he rushes to get to work on time.
Chapter 2 Summary
Bob picks up several of his coworkers in his new 1942 Buick Roadmaster on the way to work, which he bought right after he became a leaderman at the shipyard. Homer, Conway, Smitty, Johnson, and Pigmeat give Bob a hard time about being late and banter a bit irritably with each other. The men complain about getting the jobs that nobody else wants to do at work and joke about quitting. Pigmeat and Homer say that no one else will hire a Black man, nor do “they”—meaning white people—want them going to school. The men return to the idea of quitting their jobs, and they laugh and discuss whipping their boss, a white man named Kelly, when they quit.
Bob is irritated by the hateful looks he receives from white pedestrians crossing the street in front of them at a red light, and he stares them down with just as much hatred. After that encounter, it seems to Bob like every car driven by a white person is trying to cut him off and ride his bumper. His irritation turns into anger, and Bob thinks that he might have enjoyed the chaotic scramble up the highway if he were a “white boy,” but instead it all felt racist to him. The rush, bustle, and industry of the city meant nothing to Bob, and “all [he] wanted in the world was to push [his] Buick Roadmaster over some peckerwood’s [white man’s] face” (16).
Driving recklessly and cutting people off repeatedly, Bob speeds into the stretch of shipyards as some white men look at him “queerly.” Feeling belligerent about being late, Bob attempts to hold his temper as the parking lot attendant tells him to move his car. On the way in, Bob stops to get a late card. The gatekeeper and guard leer at Bob and his coworkers, remarking that Black men are always late and speculating about them being out on the town getting drunk the night before. Bob and his coworkers ignore the remarks, even when another guard tells Bob to put out his cigarette and asks why “colored boys can’t never obey no rules” (17). Instead of reacting, Bob observes to himself that “the white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning” (17).
Chapter 3 Summary
Bob then picks up the time cards from Bessie, one of the workers in his crew, then drops the time cards off at the clerk’s desk. Bob’s boss, Kelly—who constantly gives Bob a hard time—asks, “How’s that colored gang of yours coming along, Bob?” (19). Rather than respond to Kelly’s jabs, Bob turns to the clerk to ask for a blueprint. The clerk is new on the job and looks confused, but finally retrieves the blueprint with Bob’s help. Looking at Kelly for approval, she tells Bob he cannot take the blueprint out of the office. Bob takes it with him anyway, thinking that all the white leadermen take out prints whenever they want.
Heading back to the third deck, Bob notices the variously friendly, hostile, and coy looks of the many white female workers he passes by. Bob has never made a pass at any of them, as the Black and white workers alike are very protective of the white women. Besides, he has Alice, who he thinks is better than any white woman.
Bob suddenly comes face-to-face with a white woman with “peroxide blonde” hair. They stare at each other until the woman “deliberately” puts on a terrified look and backs away from Bob (20), and he realizes that she has done this several times before. For the first time, he feels becomes angry at the action, but the anger morphs into intense lust. He can feel the lust emanating from him and watches as the woman senses it herself and blushes, the frightened look disappearing. Seeing this, Bob suddenly feels sick to his stomach and turns away, climbing up to the fourth deck. There, he runs into a young Black girl who flirts with him, and his nausea evaporates.
Instead of looking at the blueprint like he had planned, Bob goes to help one of his crewmembers as the rest of the crew works and banters back and forth about where they are from and who is whose boss. Kelly shows up abruptly and, observing Bob’s crew’s work, asks why they cannot do anything right. When Kelly leaves, Smitty wonders why Kelly picks on Bob so much. As Bob walks out, one of the workers—a UCLA graduate with slightly white features—remarks, “Tough, Bob, but you got to take it” (25).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chester Himes’s 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go critiques the troubling truths of Black life in the United States during the 1940s. Stylistically, Himes’s novel is similar to the hard-boiled, gruff style of 1930s and 1940s detective fiction, which is characterized by both cynicism and violence. (Some examples of classic hard-boiled detective fiction are Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.) Chapters 1 to 3 of the novel introduce the fast-paced, hard-boiled tone and style through the first-person narration by the novel’s protagonist, Los Angeles shipyard leaderman Bob Jones. However, while Himes’s book takes its tone and style from hard-boiled fiction, it stands apart from that genre because its plot lacks a central mystery and its themes offer an intense critique of American Equality and Systemic Racism.
In that vein, Himes’s first three chapters present and expound on Bob’s constant feelings of fear and dread living as a Black man in a period of increased racism in Los Angeles. Himes does this by rapidly describing successive microaggressions that layer over each other to create a cyclical—and inescapable—experience of fear and rage. The scene in which Jones drives his coworkers to work at the shipyard demonstrates the almost feverish nature of Bob’s experience as a Black man. Driving his Buick through chaotic traffic in Los Angeles, Bob angrily accelerates and slams on the brakes as white pedestrians and drivers glare hatefully at him, cut him off in traffic, and ride his bumper. The constant presence of whiteness makes Bob feel like he is surrounded by an angry mob, closing in on him menacingly and making him feel trapped. The lynch mob is therefore a specter at the beginning of the novel before Bob explicitly expresses fears about it.
The environment at the LA shipyard where Bob works is similarly chaotic and oppressive. The entire ship is overwhelmingly crowded with workers, tools, equipment, and cigarette smoke. Moving about the decks of the ship in such cramped quarters is conducive to coming face-to-face with white workers over and over again. Much like Bob’s drive through traffic, something as simple and routine as walking through his workplace is peppered with relentless unexpected moments of both overt and passive hostility from white workers, underscoring the atmosphere of Racist Antagonism and Color Prejudice.
While Bob narrates the moment-by-moment happenings of a regular day in his life, his observations of the people around him are constantly fixated on race: specifically, on being white versus being Black. People’s physical appearance, facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language are all related to race in Bob’s perspective. Bob is particularly observant of Black people who have lighter skin than he does. His sweetheart, the lighter-skinned Alice Harrison, seems to him a cut above all other Black people in LA, coming from the family of an extremely wealthy doctor and having the kind of job that is usually reserved for white people. Similarly, Bob encounters a young Black man with a college degree from UCLA working near his crew in the shipyard; noticing his lighter skin and straight Black hair, Bob speculates that the young man could probably do Bob’s job better and is likely more knowledgeable. In this way, Himes begins to show how skin color works as a social marker. Not only does lighter skin give people more opportunities—economically, socially, and otherwise—but it also translates to personal value. The lighter a person’s skin, the more worth that person has. This becomes especially damaging when it is internalized by someone like Bob, who starts to believe he is worthless because of the color of his skin.
A sense of how Bob interacts with women also begins to take shape in Chapters 1 to 3 as well. Bob briefly alludes to sexual experiences with several women: his neighbor, the married Ella Mae Brown; a lady named Susie, with whom Jones occasionally skips work to drink rum; Alice Harrison, the wealthy, educated, employed, light-skinned Black woman whom Bob is overwhelmingly proud to go out with; and “a little fat brown-skinned girl” he encounters on the ship who flirts with him coyly (21). Most notably, he has a sexually tense encounter with a white woman on the ship in Chapter 3. The “peroxide blonde” with heavy make-up, who Bob describes as looking promiscuous, makes Bob extremely angry when she plays at being terrified of him. When Bob’s anger unexpectedly shifts into near-palpable lust, the woman blushes, seeming to invite Bob’s lust. Bob is repulsed by these feelings toward the woman and does not feel better until he encounters a Black girl who flirts with him. Bob’s experiences with racist and sexual tension appear to be intertwined, and these tense experiences continue through the remainder of Bob’s day at work in the shipyard, laying the groundwork for the work’s consideration of Masculinity, Emasculation, and Rage.
