"Himes, Chester - If He Hollers Let Him Go" - читать интересную книгу автора (Himes Chester)

IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO
by Chester Himes


Copyright 1945, 1972, 1986 by Chester Himes. All rights reserved.

Published in the United Stares by Thunder's Mouth Press, 54 Greene St., New York, NY 10013
Cover design by Lorerra Li
Cover illustration: The Bettmann Archive


Foreword


The forty years since publication of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go have not been kind to this brilliant novel. It was dismissed by some critics as a "protest" novel and exploited by cheap paperback publishers who emphasized the sensational aspects of interracial sex in the book. By the early 1970's, If He Hollers Let Him Go had gone out of print. With this reprint, it is now time to assess Chester Himes's achievement as a literary diamond, reflecting the harsh truths of black life in America during the 1940's.
The predominant theme of the novel is racial antagonism. The story is related in the hard-boiled, tough-guy style familiar to students of the detective novel of the 1930's and 1940's. It is narrated in the first person by Bob Jones, a young black man working in the defense industry in Los Angeles during World War II. Written at a time when lynching was not uncommon, race intrudes upon Jones's every thought and action. During the highly compressed four-day period of this story, Jones loses his job, his girl, and his army deferment; he is falsely accused of raping a white woman and that forces him to enlist to avoid jail.
The novel's white characters are equally obsessed by race, and these feelings are dramatized most memorably by Jones at the close of the second chapter. The scene involves Jones in a harrowing race through the streets of Los Angeles with his white co-workers on their way to work. At last, Jones arrives at the factory, only a few minutes late. Whereupon, the white timekeeper insults him with a racial slur. Jones comments to himself: "white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning."
Although hostility between the races is pivotal to understanding If He Hollers, the novel is also a linguistic tour de force for Himes. His tense, bleak language is reminiscent of the muscular prose of such detective novelists as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and David Goodis. An additional influence on Himes was surely the authors of the Black Mask school of detective novels whom he studied during an earlier seven-year stretch he spent in prison.
Later in his career, Himes would earn money writing numerous potboilers about two Harlem detectives for French publishers. Two of these books (Cotton Comes to Harlem and The Crazy Kill) are once again in print, in the U.S., and others may be found in second-hand bookstores. Read with Himes's other, more serious novels which appeared after If He Hollers, they demonstrate the constant attraction the roman noir held for him.
As in detective novels of the period, If He Hollers expresses an existential despair. Events overwhelm Bob Jones; the blatant unfairness of the rape charge against him mimics the arbitrary fates of the heroes in many a tough-guy novel. The important difference, however, is that Himes unravels Jones's fate not in terms of an implacable, unknowable fate, but rather places it directly within the historic fabric of racial antagonisms in America.
A significant parallel between If He Hollers Let Him Go and similar genre novels is also its treatment of violence. Murderous rage lurks beneath every surface. After a dice game, Jones is knocked out by a young white bully. Regaining consciousness and finding most of his winnings gone, Jones determines to seek revenge. When he realizes the homicidal strength of his passion, Jones is filled with sweet feelings of satisfaction and a sense of proprietorship over "his white boy." Though this fury may reflect a nod towards Richard Wright's Native Son, published six years before, Bob Jones's character has more in common with the cool, remorseless killers of the detective novel. Its analysis of every nuance and permutation of the racial question, however, elevates If He Hollers to a higher artistry. Himes's scorching prose is softened by his juxtaposition of descriptions of the people and the terrain of Los Angeles in those times. Through Jones's eyes, we are given a street tour of L.A.'s bars, restaurants, fast-food joints, and party scenes in nearly photographic detail. The novel is a Baedecker of high and low, white and black Angelino life during the 1940's.
If He Hollers Let Him Go is, finally, a concise history of black workers in this important transitional period. The surging demand for labor in a war economy opened new doors to employment for Afro-Americans. Southern blacks migrated to Los Angeles and San Diego in search of work in the munitions and ship-building factories. The saga of these black workers is too little known, and If He Hollers stands as an important document to that neglected story.
This first novel by Chester Himes is an accurate portrait of an important era just before the early stages of integration. If his message seems too bitter, we should remember that America's dreams of racial equality have yet to be realized. Himes has written a story that must be confronted honestly.

GRAHAM HODGES
New York City, 1985





CHAPTER

I

I dreamed a fellow asked me if I wanted a dog and I said yeah, I'd like to have a dog and he went off and came back with a little black dog with stiff black gold-tipped hair and sad eyes that looked something like a wirehaired terrier. I was standing in front of a streetcar that was just about to start and the fellow led the dog by a piece of heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck and handed me the end of the wire and asked me if I liked the dog. I took the wire and said sure I liked the dog. Then the dog broke loose and ran over to the side of the street trailing the wire behind him and the fellow ran and caught it and brought it back and gave it to me again.
'About the--' I began. I wanted to ask him how much it cost because I didn't have any money.
But he cut me off. 'Now about the pay. It'll cost you a dollar and thirty-five cents.'
I said, 'I haven't got any money now but I'll give it to you on Monday.'
'Sure, that's all right,' he said.
I took the dog and got on the streetcar. I liked the little dog; but when I got home nobody else seemed to like it.
Then I turned over and dreamed on the other side.
I was working in a war plant where a white fellow named Frankie Childs had been killed and the police were there trying to find out who did it.
The police lieutenant said, 'We got to find a big tall man with strong arms, big hands, and a crippled leg.'
So they started calling in the coloured fellows. The first one to be called was a medium-sized, well-built, fast-walking, dark brown man of about thirty-five. He was dressed in a faded blue work shirt and blue denim overall pants tied about the waist with a cord. He came up from the basement and walked straight to the lieutenant and looked him in the eye, standing erect and unflinching.
The lieutenant asked, 'Can you stand the test?'
'What test?' the coloured fellow wanted to know.
'Can you go up to the third floor and look the dead body of Frankie Childs in the face?'
The coloured fellow said, 'Frankie Childs! Sure, I can go up and look at that bastard dead or alive.' He had a fine, scholarly voice, carrying but unmusical. He turned and started up the stairs three at a time. Suddenly I began to laugh.
'Oh!' I said to the lieutenant. 'You gonna keep 'em running upstairs until you find out what one's crippled.' I fell out and rolled all over the floor laughing.