If He Hollers Let Him Go

Chester B. Himes

ISBN 10: 0451048466 / ISBN 13: 9780451048462

Published by Signet, 1971

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0451048466I3N00

Synopsis:

Robert Jones, a charming, educated Black, enjoys the comfort and privileges of middle-class life until an embittered white woman accuses him of rape

Review: A classic of Afro-American fiction, Chester Himes' first novelIf He Hollers Let Him Go, offers powerful testimony and witness to the poisonous rage and anxieties, the frustration and despair at stunted possibilities of a black "leaderman", Bob Jones. Set in a Cleveland shipyard during the Second World War, the novel reflects the pervasive violence and devastingly perverse paradigms of American racism through the traumatic experiences of Jones who, from the moment he wakes up and drives to work until the moment he returns home and goes to sleep, is literally overwhelmed by the raw, brutal circumstances of Jim Crowism. Finding himself trapped by the unremittingly stark stereotypes of race and his own psychic internalisation of the contradictions, paradoxes and inequities of race, Jones's anguished isolation is communicated through both his strained relations with Alice--his black bourgeois girlfriend--and his illicit, perverse desire for Madge, a Southern white working class woman whose sexual demands result in him being falsely charged with rape. The latter forms the climax to the novel and shows, among other things, how palpably intermingled sex and racism have been (and are) in American society. Jones's pain, awkwardness and discomfort, revealing the price of that intermingling, here dramatised as an emasculated and petrified version of black "manhood". --David Marriott

Bibliographic Details

Title: If He Hollers Let Him Go
Publisher: Signet
Publication Date: 1971
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket