“I dreamed I was lying in the middle of Main Street downtown in front of the Federal Building and two poor peckerwoods in overalls were standing over me beating me with lengths of rubber hose. I was sore and numb from the beating and felt like vomiting; I was sick in the stomach and the taste was in my mouth… I was hoping I would become unconscious but I couldn’t. Then I felt myself rolling over in bed, struggling with the covers, but I couldn’t wake up, and the dream kept right on with the two peckerwoods beating me not quite to death” (69).
If He Hollers Let Him Go begins with Bob’s description of his dreams (see page 1). Bob’s dreams are continuously weaved into the body of the novel. In this dream, two white men, following the orders of the president of the shipyard corporation, beat Bob with a rubber hose. In response to the suggestion that Bob can no longer handle further beating, the president says, “ ‘Niggers can take it as long as you give it to them’ ” (69). The white man becomes the “giver” and the black man is supposed to be the passive receiver, capable of taking all of the abuse that the white man gives him. When two people walk by the Federal Building, Bob explains, “I tried to tell the coloured people what he [the president of the shipyard corporation] had been doing before they came but my voice wouldn’t come out and they just looked at him as if he was a good kind god and said, ‘Yassuh, some of these heah boys do git out of their place’" (70).” The witnesses of this crime passively receive the president’s explanation— they “take it as long as you give it to them.” Bob desperately wants to give these witnesses access to the truth, but his voice does not come. He is unable to unmask the racism that nearly kills him (in his dreams and arguably outside of them).
Bob importantly hopes to “become unconscious” but cannot. Consciousness and dreaming are important themes in If He Hollers Let Him Go. Even while dreaming—even while technically unconscious—Bob is conscious of the violence of inequality. Racism invades his waking life as well as his sleeping life. Bob felt himself “…rolling over in bed, struggling with the covers, but… couldn’t wake up, and the dream kept right on with the two peckerwoods beating me not quite to death” (70). In his dreams, Bob wishes to be unconscious yet while he sleeps he desires to wake up. The barrier between nightmare and reality is broken down. This broken barrier asks a question that resurfaces again and again in Himes' novel: how will Bob escape his nightmarish reality?
The Federal Building, the president of the shipyard corporation, and the presence of police act as markers of institutionalized racism. Racism invades not only dreams, but shipyards, war politics, and every level of government authority.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Hollers- Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center
“Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I’d seen them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s dark son, that started me getting scared” (3).
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The Executive Order authorized the removal and internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans. Throughout Chester Himes' novel, the character Bob relates the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to his personal reality and feeling of entrapment.
Japanese Americans like the character Riki Oyana were sent to the Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center before being transferred to relocation centers.
Photographs of the Santa Anita Racetrack:
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/japan/caoth/20-1466a.jpg
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/japan/caoth/20-1464a.jpg
Map of Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II:
http://nmazca.com/blog/japanese_internment_camp_map.jpg
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The Executive Order authorized the removal and internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans. Throughout Chester Himes' novel, the character Bob relates the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to his personal reality and feeling of entrapment.
Japanese Americans like the character Riki Oyana were sent to the Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center before being transferred to relocation centers.
Photographs of the Santa Anita Racetrack:
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/japan/caoth/20-1466a.jpg
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/japan/caoth/20-1464a.jpg
Map of Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II:
http://nmazca.com/blog/japanese_internment_camp_map.jpg
Hollers - Madge's Apartment
This area of Los Angeles, despite its poverty, is still a white district off limits to Bob (when he stepped into a bar “everyone in the joint got on their muscle” (139)). The scene is one of the novel’s turning points, one of the many times it builds to violence only to relent.
The dialogue here references the greater geographical distinction between the west and the south. Madge yells that just being alone in a room with a white woman would “get you lynched in Texas.” Bob counters with “this ain’t Texas” (147). Is he right? Are there any differences between the Los Angeles of If He Hollers Let Him Go and “the south”? If so, is it any better?
The dialogue here references the greater geographical distinction between the west and the south. Madge yells that just being alone in a room with a white woman would “get you lynched in Texas.” Bob counters with “this ain’t Texas” (147). Is he right? Are there any differences between the Los Angeles of If He Hollers Let Him Go and “the south”? If so, is it any better?
Hollers - Little Tokyo
The mention of Little Tokyo, of course, references the Japanese internment. After the removal of Japanese residents the area became known as Bronzeville for a brief time (because of the new African-American population). Japanese residents moved back after the war. The later discussion between Alice’s socialite friends references “the Little Tokyo problem” (82) – i.e. the lack of integration in the area’s new ghetto. The portrayal of Little Tokyo in the book points to a binary geographical definition of race. Although some distinction exists between the areas for blacks and Asians, their most defining characteristic is their lack of whiteness. Both can rotate through areas like Little Tokyo but neither can live in the white areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Tokyo,_Los_Angeles,_California
The scene in the bar is fascinating because it displays racial issues through the lens of gender. I thought of Frantz Fanon when reading this chapter. Fanon, a black Martiniquan educated in psychiatry, is best known for Wretched of the Earth (a book that develops a theory for decolonization). Before, though, he wrote Black Skin White Masks, a larger work about black consciousness and identity. Take this excerpt about the sexual objectification of black males: “[Women] endowed the Negro with powers that other men (husbands, transient lovers) did not have. And besides there was also an element of perversion, the persistence of infantile formations: God knows how they make love! It must be terrifying” (158). Then this passage about the white male response: “Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge?... Is the Negro’s superiority real? Everyone knows that it is not. But that is not what matters.” (159)
A Fanonian reading of the text would conclude that issues of virility and masculinity are tied up in almost every interaction. The white woman in this scene flirts because of the sexual objectification described above. Her white friends are uncomfortable because they want to protect her but also because they feel the threat to their masculinity. This same sentiment makes Mac eager to punish Bob for insulting Madge. It would make the people in Madge’s apartment building “call the police and have [Bob] arrested on general principles” (139) if he were to enter the lobby. Interestingly, Fanon refers directly If He Hollers Let Him Go as an example of this mix of racial and gender issues. “Basically,” he writes, “does this fear of rape [by a black man] not itself cry out for rape?... In If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes describes this type very well. The big blonde trembles whenever the Negro goes near her. Yet she has nothing to fear, since the factory is full of white men. In the end, she and the Negro go to bed together.” (156)
Fanon obviously read the text with a certain bias. Nonetheless, his reading is interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Tokyo,_Los_Angeles,_California
The scene in the bar is fascinating because it displays racial issues through the lens of gender. I thought of Frantz Fanon when reading this chapter. Fanon, a black Martiniquan educated in psychiatry, is best known for Wretched of the Earth (a book that develops a theory for decolonization). Before, though, he wrote Black Skin White Masks, a larger work about black consciousness and identity. Take this excerpt about the sexual objectification of black males: “[Women] endowed the Negro with powers that other men (husbands, transient lovers) did not have. And besides there was also an element of perversion, the persistence of infantile formations: God knows how they make love! It must be terrifying” (158). Then this passage about the white male response: “Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge?... Is the Negro’s superiority real? Everyone knows that it is not. But that is not what matters.” (159)
A Fanonian reading of the text would conclude that issues of virility and masculinity are tied up in almost every interaction. The white woman in this scene flirts because of the sexual objectification described above. Her white friends are uncomfortable because they want to protect her but also because they feel the threat to their masculinity. This same sentiment makes Mac eager to punish Bob for insulting Madge. It would make the people in Madge’s apartment building “call the police and have [Bob] arrested on general principles” (139) if he were to enter the lobby. Interestingly, Fanon refers directly If He Hollers Let Him Go as an example of this mix of racial and gender issues. “Basically,” he writes, “does this fear of rape [by a black man] not itself cry out for rape?... In If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes describes this type very well. The big blonde trembles whenever the Negro goes near her. Yet she has nothing to fear, since the factory is full of white men. In the end, she and the Negro go to bed together.” (156)
Fanon obviously read the text with a certain bias. Nonetheless, his reading is interesting.
Hollers - Alice's Friend's House
After the incident in Santa Monica the two return to a friendlier neighborhood. “I followed Alice into the small, cramped room, wondering how she knew such people; they were more the kind of people I should know” (65). This scene exposes a number of divisions among the characters in the novel. We get statements of gender difference (“‘Men are such boors,’ Alice commented acidly (66)), of racial difference (Bob’s descriptions of everyone’s skin color (65)) and finally, of difference in sexual orientation. Himes only hints at Alice’s lesbianism here but the issue becomes explosive later in the novel.
Hollers - Santa Monica/ S. Monica Station
Bob and Alice get pulled over and their race becomes a problem. Alice tries to assert her “white” characteristics (“enunciating each syllable with careful deliberation”). In the end, though, they get arrested and taken to the police station in Santa Monica. Once again, we see a part of L.A. where Bob and Alice aren’t allowed. “I put up cash bail and the desk sergeant said, “Now get back where you belong and stay there” (64).
Hollers - White Man's Home
“At Alameda Street [the car] turned north into Compton and two of the riders in back got out, leaving my boy alone. When it stopped before a house in Huntington Park I rolled up and parked right behind it. My boy got out…He glanced idly at my car, took two steps towards the house, then wheeled about and stared into my eyes. His eyes stretched with a stark incredulity and his face went stiff white, like wrinkled paper. He stood rigid, half turned, as if frozen to the spot” (44).
It makes sense that this scene of (threatened) racial violence would take place in Huntington Park. “Huntington Park was an almost exclusively white community during most of its history; Alameda Street and Slauson Avenue, which were fiercely defended segregation lines in the 1950s, separated it from black areas.” Bob truly would have been an outsider (and seen as an invader) when he drove into Huntington Park. In addition, the area was first incorporated as a suburb for industrial workers in Los Angeles’ factories. Many of Atlas Steel’s white workers would have lived in this area, on the frontlines of racial tension.
It’s interesting that racial identity is reaffirmed through the threat of violence. When he sees Bob, the man’s face takes on the qualities of his race (stiff, white). One could even think of the characters in the scene, then, as fulfilling their roles in the racial conflict. Bob plays the role that white society assigns him (the frightening, violent black man) while the white man plays his role in the eyes of the black community (stiff, white).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Park%2C_California
It makes sense that this scene of (threatened) racial violence would take place in Huntington Park. “Huntington Park was an almost exclusively white community during most of its history; Alameda Street and Slauson Avenue, which were fiercely defended segregation lines in the 1950s, separated it from black areas.” Bob truly would have been an outsider (and seen as an invader) when he drove into Huntington Park. In addition, the area was first incorporated as a suburb for industrial workers in Los Angeles’ factories. Many of Atlas Steel’s white workers would have lived in this area, on the frontlines of racial tension.
It’s interesting that racial identity is reaffirmed through the threat of violence. When he sees Bob, the man’s face takes on the qualities of his race (stiff, white). One could even think of the characters in the scene, then, as fulfilling their roles in the racial conflict. Bob plays the role that white society assigns him (the frightening, violent black man) while the white man plays his role in the eyes of the black community (stiff, white).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Park%2C_California
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)