The place is Los Angeles, the time is the early 1940s, and the US is so hell-bent on building up its navy to defeat Japan that non-white workers are being employed in the shipyards to build new vessels of war.
Sean Sheehan
Robert ‘Bob’ Jones is one such worker and, being good at his job, is promoted to the post of crew leader.
In charge of a small group of other black workers, Bob is doing well and has been able to buy himself a car.
All he has to do is swallow his pride and accept the institutional inferiority that goes with being black. “If he hollers, let him go”, first published in 1945, is a story of what happens when he refuses to accept this.
Repudiating a racial slur by a female employee – women have also been brought into the industrialization of war – Bob is demoted.
When he expresses his anger, he is viciously beaten up by a group of white workers. He vows to kill the man who has inflicted the worst of the physical beating and, knowing he will murder him in cold blood, Bob feels immensely better and cheers up. Readers know they are in for a hard ride.
What follows is a fast and furious tale which transcends the revenge genre. Everything Bob observes is blighted by racism, not just people and his relationships with them but neighbourhoods, magazine covers, dreams, sex. He is seething with resentment and is not prepared to put his head down and accept the way things are.
Racialized sex is the dynamite that explodes, producing a dramatic and compelling plot that unfolds over four days and shows what it means to be black in the USA.
‘Blackness is social death’, writes Wilderson uncompromisingly in Afropessimism, a violence beyond the carnage of capitalism and gender oppression, structurally excluding black people and making them ‘the hosts of Human parasites’. Afropessimism’s insistence that the grammar of hurt for black people is sui generis and demanding of a truly radical agenda for change is borne out by “If he hollers, let him go”. The 1940s may seem a long time away but the story is set in California, not in one of the southern states, and Black Lives Matter is the reminder that racism is alive and well in the USA. What is required is the resolve shown by Malcolm X in making X his family name as a signifier for a possible future arising from the erasure of a past identity and this is what Bob Jones, in his own very angry way, is trying to do.
This is the first novel Chester Himes wrote and eventually he would self-exile in Paris and become famous for a series of detective stories featuring two black police officers.
Afropessimism is not self-defeatism, mourning does not exclude agency, but its defiance provokes asking how an authentic anti-racism should be constructed
“If he hollers, let him go” by Chester Himes, is published by Penguin.
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