62 pages • 2 hours read
Chester HimesIf He Hollers Let Him Go
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Still feeling bolstered by his friends’ support, Bob goes to talk to the union steward, who gives Bob arbitrary excuses for why he cannot help him regain his position as leaderman. Bob gets angry, and in his rage, he decides to go confront Madge himself. Though he is still depressed about Alice’s ultimatum, Bob knows he cannot follow her advice and apologize to Madge. Instead, he decides he is going to confront her and ask: “[W]hat the hell she meant by saying she wouldn’t work with a n*****, where did she get that stuff calling [him] a n*****, anyway?” (110). If Madge does not like it, he decides, he will kick her in the teeth. If it means losing Alice, then so be it.
However, when Bob finds Madge on the deck below, he ends up having a strange conversation with Don, an elderly white mechanic who witnessed his altercation with Madge, instead. Don apologizes to Bob about the incident, saying he had no idea it would all result in Bob getting demoted. When Madge notices Bob, she abruptly jumps up and goes into her usual act of feigning terror at the sight of him. “Get a load of this,” Bob says to Don, and Bob observes Don studying him “with that sharp speculating curiosity of white men watching Negroes’ reactions to white women” (111). Since Madge’s theatrics are not getting a rise out of Bob, Madge says, aggressively, “Sometimes I sho wish I was back in Texas” (111), the implication being that being in the South would change their power dynamic significantly. The tensions build, but the mechanic gets Madge’s attention before it can come to a head.
Don returns to the previous conversation and apologizes to Bob again, but it becomes clear that Don is curious as to whether Bob and Madge have had a sexual encounter that might have prompted their altercation. Don says Madge “needs a good going over by someone” and that maybe Bob “can cure her” of her prejudice (111). With that, Don suddenly offers to give Madge’s address to Bob. Bob is confused by this, thinking that he would never want to be with a white girl like Madge and that he certainly would not attempt to sexually assault her in order to get even. Bob wants to tell Don that he does not want to have sex with Madge, but he feels very awkward. When Bob goes back to his crew to talk about how things went with the union master, Ben, the light-skinned man with the UCLA degree, insists that the only way to get anything from white people is to fight them. Arguing will never do the trick, he insists, and Bob agrees.
Chapter 14 Summary
Bob gets stuck listening to a white worker telling a racist joke thanks to Kelly, who tells Bob he needs to talk to him, but deliberately makes him wait while the white worker finishes telling the racist joke. After hearing the joke, Bob realizes he wants to rape Madge, not talk to her. He feels that the only way to be able to keep looking the white folks in the face will be if he “make[s] her as low as a white whore in a Negro slum” (116). He goes and finds her where she is working, but when she sees him and makes eye contact, her whiteness makes him too afraid to even approach her to say what he wants to say.
Bob feels disgusted by his lack of nerve, thinking that a white man would have had no trouble approaching Madge. However, he also thinks about how he went out with white girls back in Cleveland, and he realizes that it is not the fact that Madge is white but how she uses her whiteness: “She had a sign up in front of her as big as Civic Centre—KEEP AWAY, N******, I’M WHITE! And without having to say one word she could keep all the white men in the world feeling they had to protect her from black rapists” (118). This is what scares Bob about Madge most, knowing she is trying to lure him in with her body, only to use her whiteness to have him “lynched.” Even with this realization, Bob still thinks that he ought to rape her because that “is what she wanted” (118).
Feeling agitated and stuck, Bob picks up a piece of wood, wanders around the ship, and suddenly realizes he is wandering with a purpose: He is looking for the man who knocked him out after the gambling game at work two days earlier. Bob learns that his name is Johnny Stoddart, and when he finds Johnny, they size each other up. Johnny looks around for a weapon and, seeing that there is not one, tells Bob, “I’ll fight you” (120). Bob tells him he does not want to fight him; he wants to kill him, not right now, but eventually. Johnny is visibly afraid, and this makes Bob feel good. He feels that he has “spit the white folks out of [his] mouth” (120), and now he is ready to walk right up to Madge.
Chapter 15 Summary
Bolstered by his encounter with Johnny, Bob goes to talk to Madge during lunch, expecting to fight with her. At first, she acts like she does not know who he is, then suddenly becomes agreeable and flirty, acting like they should just move past the fight. Madge’s sister-in-law, Elsie, joins Bob and Madge. Madge introduces Elsie to Bob, telling her that she and Bob had a fight but have made up. Elsie talks incessantly about how Black folks act differently in Texas than they do in California. She says that Black folks in Texas like to keep to themselves, away from white folks, and because of this, they do not have racial tension in Texas. The race riots in the north, she claims, are because of integration. Elsie says that white folks are simply different from Black folks and that white folks are made in God’s image. She claims that Black people were made to fill up the rest of the world.
Bob makes several attempts to interrupt Elsie’s babbling until, mercifully, the lunch whistle blows to send everyone back to work. Elsie leaves, and as Madge gets up to go, Bob mouths to her, “I’m coming up to see tonight” (125). Madge coyly insists that he better not. Bob tells her to look for him around 8 o’clock.
Bob’s crew finds Bob and they all walk back to the work site. Peaches teases Bob for talking to a white woman, which prompts a heated argument between Peaches and the men about Black women and white women. The men insist that Black women are difficult and hard to get along with and that white women are easier because they just want to be loved. This gets Peaches heated; she says that they would fork over all their money for “the raggedest-looking old beat-up white tramp” but grumble and complain about paying to take a Black woman out to the movies (126). They pass Madge as this conversation continues. Madge puts on her terrified act; Ben wonders aloud what is wrong with her and asks Bob if she is “the cracker” he had trouble with. Bob nods, to which Ben ponders: “What the hell is she trying to do, make as if she’s scared of Negroes?” (127). The men ask Bob if he has heard anything else about his job situation since Madge got him demoted. He says he has not heard anything yet, and they stop asking questions.
Chapter 16 Summary
During Bob’s drive home from work, he sets his mind to go to the hotel where Madge lives and see her that night. He cleans up and puts on a nice outfit when he gets home; Bob then tells Ella Mae he is going out with his white woman and that he likes his white women and could not get along without them. Ella Mae says he is “just like all the other n*****” and then tells him Alice called earlier (129). Bob stops long enough to call Alice back. Alice asks if Bob apologized to Madge and got his old job back like she asked him to. He says he did not, and he will not do it. This prompts Alice to ask Bob if he loves her. He says yes, but when Alice wants Bob to take her out that night, he simply tells her, “Not tonight, baby” (130).
Intent on his task, Bob goes out and gets a bottle of brandy, then drives to Madge’s side of town. He finds her hotel and parks across the street to see if he can see Madge’s room from his car. After a while, he drives to a nearby beer joint to call the hotel and ask the concierge if he can speak to Madge in room 202. The concierge says she is out.
Bob is afraid the concierge will call the police if he goes to the front desk to ask about Madge, so he decides to abandon his plan, drive over to Alice’s, and see if she still wants to go out. When he arrives, he finds that Alice is going to a lecture with Tom Leighton, the condescending white man Bob met at Alice’s the day before. Alice and Tom invite Bob to come along, but Bob is too jealous. Instead, he drives to a barbeque joint, angrily swigging brandy on the way. He is so sickened at the thought of Alice going out with a white man and blending in with the white folks that he cannot finish his food. He leaves and goes to a jukejoint to drink more brandy. While he is there, he realizes he is going to go back and see Madge, just to get even with everyone—with Alice, Mac, Kelly, and all the other white folks who have wronged him.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Chapters 13 to 16 take a significant turn as the object of Bob’s feelings of Masculinity, Emasculation, and Rage comes into clearer focus. Bob feels that a justified response to the way white folks have treated him is violence—to kill Johnny Stoddart, the “white boy” who knocked him out during the game of craps, and to rape Madge, the white woman who called him a racist slur. Bob’s impulse to enact physical violence against fellow human beings presents an ethical quandary. The narrative poses the possibility that the feelings that fuel Bob’s violent impulses—fear and rage—are a legitimate response to the way white people treat him.
This section thus raises the question of what constitutes violence and how people should respond to it. Himes suggests that violence is more than just a punch or a kick—violence is also Racist Antagonism and Color Prejudice. Furthermore, Bob’s impulse to act violently toward Johnny and Madge represents a deeper desire for a revolution. When Bob suggested the possibility of revolution while discussing Richard Wright’s novel in the previous section, Tom, Alice’s white friend, condescendingly dismissed the possibility, siding with Alice’s view that Black folks should, essentially, imitate white people to achieve equality. Bob feels in his heart that a revolutionary movement is the only thing that will ever result in Black people receiving equal rights and no longer being discriminated against. But no one—neither the Black people nor the white people with whom Bob associates—will entertain this possibility. That is why Johnny and Madge—both blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white folks—become the targets of Bob’s rage against white people as an entire race. Having acted violently toward him by physically and verbally assaulting him, Johnny and Madge represent the worst of white folks for Bob.
The outlet for Bob’s suffocating rage becomes his fantasy of staging his own small-scale revolution by doing to white folks as they have done, systemically, to Black folks: lynching (beating or killing a person based on unfounded allegations) their men and raping their women. Himes does not suggest that lynching and rape are morally defensible responses to any kind of wrongdoing, but he does show readers that Bob’s feelings of fear, rage, and helplessness are legitimate feelings in response to racism, discrimination, and oppression.
