This is a re-issue of Chester Himes' first novel, originally published
in 1945. Himes was born in Jefferson, Missouri in 1909. At the
age of 19 he was sentenced to twenty years in Ohio State Penitentiary
for armed robbery. Inside, he read Hammett and Chandler and in
fact, became a writer, publishing stories in Esquire before
his parole in 1936. Himes turned to novels, but with no real success,
so he emigrated to France where, in 1956, Série Noir
editor Marcel Duhamel persuaded Himes to try his hand at detective
fiction. The result was For Love of Imabelle (aka A
Rage In Harlem), the rest, as they say, is the Harlem cycle.
Himes is not only a key name in the hardboiled school of crime
writing, he is also a key name in black American writing. Generally
labelled a 'protest novel', If He Hollers Let Him Go is
more than 'just' a protest novel about the fate of a black shipyard
worker in a racist society. If He Hollers Let Him Go is
also where the 'protest novel' meets the 'tough guy novel', and
its prose is straight out of the top drawer. If He Hollers
Let Him Go tells the story of Bob Jones, leaderman of a gang
of black workers at the Atlas Shipyard, LA, in the 1940s. Bob
Jones is well placed: he has a good job (as a leaderman he is
protected from the draft), he drives a '42 Buick Roadmaster, and
has a black middle-class girlfriend, a social worker, whose father
is a doctor and 'community leader.' However, the segregated society
in which he lives is fraught with tension. Bob can kow-tow to
the racism-know his place, and stay there-or rail against it.
After a run in with a white woman at work, which costs him his
leaderman's job, Bob decides on the latter course.
