If He Hollers Let Him Go

Chapter 9 opens with another of Bob’s dreams, in which white men are beating him up at the command of a white shipyard president, who says, “N****** can take it as long as you give it to them” (66). Bob wakes up hungover, and despite feeling awful, he remembers everything: the terrible night with Alice, his plans to kill the white boy from work, and his rage at Madge. Alice calls, and in an awkward conversation more or less asks Bob not to tell anyone about her lesbian encounter from the night before. She wants to make it up to Bob, but Bob hangs up on her mid-sentence.

Wound up from the phone call with Alice, Bob gets up and finds his car. He wants to get away from the people he knows, from respectable people, so heads to a bar near Little Tokyo. He orders a drink and flirts with a white woman who keeps calling him a “n*****.” Soon, a white woman and two white soldiers come in. The white girl, whom Bob calls “strictly an Arkansas slick chick” (71), has a couple of beers and makes a spectacle of herself, flirting and throwing herself at all the Black men. The Black women look on contemptuously, some even with disgust. Bob realizes the girl is just like Madge. He feels bitter just thinking of her; he tries thinking about killing the white boy again, but it does not do anything to lessen his anger anymore. Killing one white man, he realizes, is futile if he cannot kill all the white folks.

Lost in his own thoughts, Bob leaves the bar and decides to go to a show. He is overwhelmed by the constant white faces surrounding him: walking down the sidewalk, on the cover of magazines in store windows, being served before him at a corner store, and being coddled by a Black mammy in the movie he goes to see. Their looming presence makes him feel overwhelmed and sick. Bob decides needs to talk to someone, to be reassured that Black people aren’t “the lowest people on the face of God’s green earth” (75). He gets in his car to leave and, even though Alice has hurt him, decides she is the only one he can talk to in order to see things clearly again.

Bob drives to Alice’s home, and Alice’s father invites him in. He sits with her father and listens to Dr. Harrison’s endless name-dropping until Alice asks him to come up. Dr. Harrison shakes Bob’s hand on his way out, and Bob thinks to himself, “He always made it a point to let me know he didn’t have anything against me, even if I didn’t belong to his class” (78-79). When Bob arrives in Alice’s sitting room, he sees she has three women visiting already—Polly, Cleo, and Arline. They are all educated and involved in social work or teaching in some way, and despite his initial impulse, Bob decides to stay and chat. The women animatedly discuss the issues that confront social workers in Little Tokyo, posing different possibilities for integrating the Southern Black Americans from “that ghetto” into the life of the community. Cleo asks Bob what he thinks about the issues. Irritated, he suggests that they kill all the Black residents and eat them, which would conveniently solve both the “race problem” and the meat shortage. The women are horrified, so Bob says he is joking, but that if he “knew any solution for the race problem [he’d] use it for [himself] first” (80). Cleo protests, saying that it is more than a race problem; it is a problem of different classes, cultures, traditions, and levels of education trying to coexist.

The conversation eventually shifts from social reform to local gossip. One of the women mentions that a Black man they know has married a white girl. This sets Cleo off. She says, “Nobody but a n***** would marry a white tramp!” (81). While Cleo continues raging about Black men marrying white women, Alice’s white, blond-haired friend Tom arrives. Bob is immediately jealous of Tom, and Bob cannot help wondering if there is something going on between him and Alice. After awkwardly introducing Tom and Bob, Alice mentions that Tom has just finished reading the novel Strange Fruit. Tom attempts to engage Bob in conversation about Strange Fruit and Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, both books about racist discrimination against Black people. Bob suggests that a revolution is the only solution to “a minority group problem” (84), and Tom condescendingly tells Bob that a sensible response is the only response. Tom’s condescension angers Bob; he cannot believe a white man has walked in and tried to explain his own oppression to him. He makes a violent gesture and rises to his feet in anger, which abruptly ends the conversation.

When Alice’s other guests leave, Alice chastises Bob for insulting Tom and for embarrassing her. She says Bob always has a chip on his shoulder, referencing their catastrophic date the night before and his chronic belligerent behavior. Her insults become increasingly acidic and cutting; Bob asks if they can drop it, but Alice will not let it go. In her anger, Alice calls Bob a “filthy Negro,” but says that, for some strange reason, she loves him.

Bob tries to resist the urge to bring up Alice’s tryst with the Black woman from the house the night before, but he cannot. He asks Alice if she is a lesbian; Alice immediately gets angry again, asking Bob if the only reason he came by today was to cross-examine her. He insists that it is not, that he just needed someone to talk to and he felt he had nowhere else to go. Bob tries to explain how he has been feeling—that he resents white people who use their whiteness as a weapon to discriminate and keep him down to the point of violence—but Alice will not hear it. She says that Bob simply needs to focus his energies on a particular objective and work very hard to achieve it. If he does this, Alice claims, “these minor incidents and day-to-day irritations” would not affect him so much (92). Besides, Alice tells him, he must learn how to do this because she wants a husband who is wealthy and respected enough that she “can avoid a major part of the discriminatory practices which [she] is sensible enough to know [she] cannot change” (92).

With that, Bob tells her about the incident with Madge at work and how he lost his job. Alice is horrified and insists that he must apologize to Madge and get his old job back. Bob tells her he cannot apologize to Madge—he cannot keep taking such treatment from white people. Despite her love for him, Alice says that she will only be with him if he can find a way to “succeed as white men do” and get along with his white coworkers (93). If he cannot do that, Alice says he should not consider her as being with him anymore. Alice’s ultimatum crushes Bob, especially since he feels he has no choice in the way he responds to discrimination.

Day three of Bob’s troubles begins as he wakes up from a terrifying dream in which Alice is killed. When he finds her dead body, she has been reduced to the size of a rag doll, and instead of being murdered by a single person, she is surrounded by hundreds of white women who appear to have done the job. Bob wakes up feeling both terrified and completely impotent.

Despite his frustration with the shipyard, Bob still leaves to pick up the boys for work. They avoid talking about what happened with Bob at work two days ago; a couple of the men ask, but several others say it is nobody’s business. Bob finally explains the run-in with Madge and how he will be working as a mechanic from now on. The boys decide that they will not stand for this. Instead of getting straight to work when they arrive at their site, they toss around ideas about what to do to get Bob reinstated as their leaderman. They consider talking to Mac, staging a revolt, or talking to the union. They talk about what Bob should have done in response to Madge calling him a slur instead of insulting her in retaliation. This eventually degenerates into the men making jokes until their new, white leaderman—who has been nervously hanging around the edge of the room up until this point—starts telling a story himself. The Black workers give him a hard time and cut him off; he tries to restart the story several times, but they keep interrupting until he gives up.

Kelly walks into the room, seemingly hoping to find the Black workers horsing around and putting off their work so that he can yell at them. To his surprise, they are all hard at work. Bob is grateful to his old crew for the laughs, which have made him feel more relaxed and at ease, like he can go talk to the union steward about the situation with Madge and his demotion without blowing his top. On the way out, he jokes laughingly with Ben, the light-skinned UCLA graduate, about how the crew of Black workers is a little rough, but they are “[his] people.”