posted by James Murray
“…but as far as the problem of the Negro industrial worker is concerned, I feel that it is not so much racial as it is the problem of the masses. As soon as the masses, including all our minority groups have achieved economic security, racial problems will reach a solution of their own accord.” He turned to me. “Won’t you agree with me to that extent, Mr. Jones?”
“No,” I said, “It’s a state of mind. As long as the white folks hate me and I hate them we can earn the same amount of money, live side by side in the same kind of house, and fight every day.”
He got one of those condescending, indulgent smiles. “Then how would you suggest effecting a solution to a minority group problem?”
“I don’t know about any other minority group problem,” I said, “but the only solution to the Negro problem is a revolution. We’ve got to make white people respect us and the only thing white people have ever respected is force.”
“But do you think a revolution by Negro people could be successful?” he asked in that gentle tone of voice usually reserved for an unruly child.
But I tried to keep my head. “Not unless there were enough white people on our side,” I said.
“By the same token,” he argued, “if there were enough white people on your side there wouldn’t be any need for a revolution.”
“There’s a lot of them who don’t do anything but talk. If we had a revolution it would force you to act, either for us or against us – personally, I wouldn’t give a goddamn which way.”
“Suppose your revolution failed?” he asked.
“That’d be all right too,” I said, “At least we’d know where we stood.”
Thank you, James, for this post. Chester Himes is one of my favorite writers and If He Hollers Let Him Go is one of my favorite of his books. I will limit myself to a few brief comments: 1) Although Himes is ordinarily regarded as a “race” writer, the book is about class as much as race; 2) He understands whiteness as something attached rather than natural: “the white folks sure brought their white to work with them that day” (quoted from memory); 3) The book’s protagonist, Bob Jones, represented a new social type, anticipating the upsurge of the 1960s; 4) as someone who holds that “being determines consciousness,” I question Jones’s assertion that “As long as the white folks hate me and I hate them we can earn the same amount of money, live side by side in the same kind of house, and fight every day.” (It may be useful to remember that it is Jones, not Himes, talking.) 5) Himes’s work refutes the myth of the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” supposedly the outgrowth of Communist Party seedings in the 1930s. Like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Himes had brushed up against the CP, was repelled by its manipulativeness (illustrated in If He Hollers and more explicitly in The Lonely Crusade), and was part of a distinct tradition; 6) When I assigned this book in classes I was surprised how many of my students had no idea of the origin of the title; for my part, I remember squatting in a circle of kids in the schoolyard (must have been around 1950) reciting Eeeny, meeny, miny, mo… to determine who would go first in a ballgame. Before I could complete the rhyme, Tommy Knox said, “If you finish that I’m gonna bust you in the face.” The only versions of the jingle I had heard had a tiger or a doggie as the principal character, but in a flash it struck me that there was another version and what that was. I look back on Tommy Knox as one of the teachers who most influenced me.