In If He Hollers Let Him Go, Alice’s philosophy differs from Bob’s on how to deal with racism. Alice seems to choose responsibility over standing up for her rights as a black woman, whereas the emotions that run through Bob make him choose to stand up for himself without fearing the consequences. By pitching these two views against each other, Himes has allowed even his most recent readers into a world we can now only read about.
Reading a novel published nearly seventy years ago about race tensions is not an easy task. Many students of our generation have grown up learning about the Civil Rights Movement and race tensions in the United States, and so when reading a novel that focuses on race we might begin with a mind already made up on the problem. Knowing that racism is a horrible blemish on America’s history, many readers might tend to assume that in a novel such as If He Hollers Let Him Go, all of the oppressed strive towards the same goal because it would be foolish of them not to. Himes opens the minds of his readers by making all of his characters have different approaches to the problem of racial inequality. He complicates our view of racial tension in the 1940’s and thereby paints a more realistic picture of the struggles that so many people went through. His novel is not merely about race, it is about human nature.
As a reader, it may be easy to think that Alice’s approach to survival is selfish or irresponsible, but what Himes shows the reader that it is not a simple task to stand up for yourself, especially when doing so might put your job on the line, or even your life. Knowing how the Civil Rights Movement transpired makes it is hard for us to imagine how Alice thought her approach would be effective, but we must keep in mind that seventy years ago there was no right way to approach the problem of racism. In short, the question of whether Alice’s philosophy was correct cannot be answered because, as Himes shows through his novel, it is more complicated than that. Himes again illustrates how complicated racial inequality was when he makes it hard to categorize his characters. They do not tend to follow the rules of the boundaries that Himes at first created, and this is troubling to the reader. Alice can go from socializing with people like Bob to white people, and the white sailors from the novel can go from having fun with other white people to having fun with people like Bob. Himes creates boundaries for his characters to cross and in doing shows the reader that the lines are more blurry than clear. He also shows that awkwardness always seems to follow a line being crossed. Alice found she could not mix the two categories she constantly crossed between when she was treated rudely in the hotel, and similarly Bob and the two sailors soon found that the line between them, though blurry, still existed as they suffered the awkward silence that followed spotting a suffering black woman.
