When we first meet Bob Jones, he is dreaming. Or so it seems.
His nightly off-kilter scenarios, however, all too closely resemble the gauntlet he weaves through each day as a working-class Black man in 1940s Los Angeles. The visions play more nightmare than reverie. Rest eludes him: One tussle, trapdoor, or racially fraught encounter bleeds into the next. At times, he reflects, “I couldn’t wake up, and the dream kept right on.”
There’s a seamlessness to his nights and days. Bob’s Los Angeles—the tense, moody landscape of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go—is less the golden dream many Black migrants were called toward and more the hollow promises they encountered, a brutal changeup they had to learn to withstand and work around.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Bob’s job as a leaderman for the Atlas Shipyard, performing wartime labor, places the recent arrival from Ohio in what outsiders consider a plum, path-to-power position. But he has come to see that his “power” is circumscribed, contingent. His position is a “credit to his race” bone tossed his way for show. “I liked my job as leaderman more than I had ever admitted to myself.… If I couldn’t have everything that went along with it, if I couldn’t be in authority…to hell with it too.”
Each morning, after Bob shakes himself awake, reality—as harsh and unforgiving as the midday L.A. sun—slides into view. His work shifts are as disquieting as his dreams: He bristles at being addressed as “bo” or “boy.” He chafes at being second-guessed or disbelieved. “Everything got under my skin,” he observes. A thousand cuts a day. A litany of indignities and emasculations that today we’d label microaggressions.
If He Hollers was Himes’s first novel. He began shaping it after he moved to Los Angeles in 1941, chasing his own West Coast dream. Writing the book offered him a way to address his complicated feelings about this so-called city of opportunity. In this sense, Bob’s and Himes’s stories are tightly braided together. As critic Hilton Als writes in a foreword to the novel’s 2002 edition, “L.A. was, as much as he despised it, his terrain—beautiful, expansive and invulnerable.”
Himes was one of the more than 300,000 Black Americans who relocated west in the early 1940s as part of the Great Migration—to escape Jim Crow and to build lives and wealth and larger senses of themselves. “But 1941 L.A. was not progressive,” writes Lawrence P. Jackson in his 2017 biography of Himes. Dust Bowl migrants, Jackson notes, had traveled there from places like Arkansas and Oklahoma and Texas to grab jobs and start new lives, and too many of them brought the worst of their small-town bigotry and racism to paradise.
Though it could be shelved as mystery, If He Hollers is neither thriller nor whodunit in a strict, genre-abiding sense. More pertinent, as Als highlights, is that “Himes produced male characters who really were noir—in fact and in sensibility. Unapologetic and testosterone-driven.” If there is a sleuth tailing anyone, it’s Bob attempting to locate his true self. What makes this book move like a thriller is its pacing. That and the keenly crafted sentences detailing Bob’s urban backdrop—the various Los Angeleses that jostle for space or scrap with one another within a region stratified by class and race. When Bob is goaded into a charged verbal tussle with a white female worker who is loath to take orders from him, their furious struggle is a watershed moment, one that ultimately becomes a stark evocation of the nightmares that haunt him—and one that will irrevocably change his life.
With dexterous skill and potency, Himes sinks us into Bob’s embattled psyche. We feel the pinpricks and absorb the slights, his simmer-to-roiling-boil escalations. We sense, too, the capacity for his fury, in a moment, to de-escalate. He may turn a corner—metaphorically and in fact. He may count his “blessings”—his position; his savvy, committed girlfriend; and this beguiling city that still gets under his skin: “Outside the setting sun slanted from the south with a yellowish, old-gold glow.… It was the best part of the day in Los Angeles.… The irritation quickly ironed out of me.”
This sharp, brutal novel landed in my hands just as I was starting as a reporter in the late 1980s, writing stories about my native city. I’d trained my eye on the underexplored and undertold—the rarely written histories of people who had come west chasing something they couldn’t name but would know, they insisted, when they felt it: a different kind of freedom. Bob Jones brought to mind the stoic figures I’d interview, people from the Greatest and Silent Generations, who would only hint at the nightmares endured to stake a claim and call Los Angeles theirs. Himes allowed me to read between their silences. Now, I walk upon pathways they constructed from shards of broken promises, in a deeply imperfect place that I too call home.•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
