If He Hollers Let Him Go

Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go provides a graphic window into the world of racism where his protagonist, Bob Jones, outlines personal dreams that serve as a framework to recreate the reality of the overwhelming prejudice prevalent in the 1940s. The novel unfolds over a course of four to five days, where each day begins with a nightmare encountering various forms of racism. Throughout each dream, Jones elicits scenes of violence, with each one escalating in visual description and immoral degree, along with his personal reflections after he wakes up. Himes’s structuring of the novel suggests a realistic representation of racism as seen through Jones’s unconscious state, where the dream sequences represent racism so pervasive that Jones cannot escape it even in his own unconscious; there is no freedom for him even within his own mind, and the dreams operate as an embellished glimpse into the reality of the chauvinistic world that Jones inhabits. Chapter One opens with Jones’s first dream, where a man asks him if he would like to have “a little black dog with stiff black gold-tipped hair and sad eyes that looked something like a wire-haired terrier” (Himes 1). Jones describes how the dog had “a piece of heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck,” and how it “broke loose” to where the man “ran and caught it and brought it back and gave it to [him] again” (1). The dog symbolizes Jones, and possibly even all of black society. Wire-haired terriers, in their natural state, are very shaggy and unkempt creatures; they need masters to instruct and groom them in order to be accepted and presentable in society. The terrier and Jones are analogous in that they are seen as things to be tamed via social construction; Jones is treated as an animal as opposed to a person with human emotion and thought because he transcends the norm by being a black man in a world dominated by whites. The “stiff hair” and “sad eyes” that characterize the dog translates to Jones since his