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 20-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary
Now that Alice has agreed to marry Bob, Bob decides he should try to get his old job as a leaderman back. When he gets back to work, he goes to talk to his boss, Mac. Mac assumes Bob is trying to avoid being drafted into the army, and while Bob admits this is partially true, he also explains that he wants to get married. Bob tells Mac that Alice is a social worker; seeming to think that Alice has used her social work training to advise Bob to accuse Mac of discrimination, Mac says that there was no discrimination involved in the decision to demote Bob and maintains that anyone who curses a woman would be demoted. However, Mac says that Bob can continue working on his old crew under the new leaderman, and if he shows that he can hold his temper and obey orders, he will consider approaching Kelly about Bob being made a leaderman again. Although Bob wants to protest, he thinks of Alice and reluctantly agrees to this arrangement.
Bob is discouraged to find that his old crew is happy with the new, white leaderman because he is able to get them better jobs. Bob assumes his old crew will never want him back as leaderman now. Disheartened, Bob strolls through the deckhouse until he stumbles upon Madge sleeping on some bunk beds in one of the cabins. She acts coy when she sees that it is Bob. In keeping with Alice’s wishes, Bob starts to apologize for the day that he cursed out Madge. She approaches him and tries to force him to kiss her, but he pushes her off. Bob says he does not want her at all, and Madge calls him a liar. Footsteps approach, and the Navy inspector demands they open the door, which Bob had locked. Madge pushes Bob hard into the bunk beds and screams for a white man to help her because she is being raped. She attacks Bob and then feigns as if she has been beaten and taken advantage of. “I’m going to get you lynched, n*****” (170), she tells Bob as the Navy inspector and several white men force their way into the room. Bob tries to explain, but the men immediately attack him. Bob pushes through a mob of what feels like a million white men, but one of them hits him in the head with a ballpeen hammer and he falls to the ground.
Chapter 21 Summary
Bob is taken to the hospital and wakes up in a recovery room, watched by a burly, white guard. He tries to remember what happened and realizes that Madge did what she said she would do: She got him lynched. Bob knows he did not try to rape her, and although he is weak and dizzy, Bob is also desperate to leave. Despite his condition, Bob clumsily gets dressed and gathers his things in order to check out of the hospital.
The guard escorts Bob to the front gate of the hospital yard, where a gatekeeper asks the guard if Bob is the guy who raped the white woman. The guard confirms and the gatekeeper calls for a police escort, telling Bob that there is a warrant out for his arrest. One of the guards tells Bob that he will get 30 years in prison, and Bob suddenly realizes that the entire system is against him—even the so-called American justice system. No one will ever believe his word over a white woman’s.
As a result, Bob decides to make a break for it. He runs from the guards and heads for the parking lot to find his car, narrowly escaping and speeding away. He realizes he cannot stay in California—he will never be able to get past the crime that Madge has tried to hang on him. He calls home for help, but Ella Mae tells him not to come—the police are already there. Still desperate to escape, Bob stops at an old friend’s house to use the phone. He calls Alice and explains he has been charged with the rape of a white woman and asks if he can borrow her car and some money to leave town. Alice refuses and insists that if he is innocent, he will not be convicted. She promises to get him an excellent lawyer so they can fight the accusations through the courts. Realizing Alice will not help him in the way he knows he needs helped, Bob hangs up.
Bob leaves his friend’s house and realizes he still has the pistol in his car. Afraid and alone, he decides to kill Johnny Stoddart just to give the white folks a real crime to convict him for, but before he can go through with his plan, police officers pull Bob’s car over. They use the pistol as a reason to bring him to the station, where they soon realize Bob is the man accused of rape that the cops are looking for in San Pedro. Later, some officers drive Bob down to San Pedro where he gets put in a jail cell alone.
Chapter 22 Summary
While in jail, Bob has a dream in which he finally kills Johnny Stoddart. Bob flees the scene but sees a huge Marine sergeant on his tail. When Bob stops and tries to fight, the sergeant traps him, throws Bob to the ground in an alley, and asks, “Whatcha do, boy, kill somebody?” (185). Bob says he killed a “peckerwood” because he called him a racist slur and raped a white woman, too. The sergeant laughs and says that he never got the chance to “kill a n*****,” but brags he has raped “all kinda women” and killed many men (185).
Bob wakes up and a jailer takes him to meet with a judge and the president of Atlas Corporation, Mr. Houghton. Mr. Houghton says that Madge decided to drop the charges against Bob because she realized that pressing charges would likely result in racial tension among the shipyard employees and hinder the shipyard’s production schedule. Houghton calls Madge’s decision “a patriotic gesture” (188). Bob realizes what has really happened: Mr. Houghton likely interrogated Madge, found that her accusations were false, and felt too guilty to allow Bob to go to prison for a crime he did not commit. However, Bob knows that Houghton will never admit any of this. Instead, Houghton proceeds to guilt trip Bob, claiming that he was given every opportunity to advance and was selected because he was “considered the highest type of Negro” but that to commit this despicable crime was a betrayal of his race (188).
When Houghton leaves, the judge asks Bob if he will stay away from white women and keep out of trouble if he gives him a break and lets him join any branch of the armed forces that Bob wants. Bob wants to burst out laughing at this supposedly merciful offer—which is actually one of Bob’s worst fears—but instead promises the judge he will stay out of trouble. The judge encourages Bob to make a good record and get an honorable discharge, which will serve him well after the war. The jailer finds an officer to escort Bob to the recruiting station. There are two Mexican youths waiting with the police officer to head to the recruiting station too. They remark that Bob looks like he has already been in his own war and ask how he is doing. Bob replies, “I’m still here” (189). Two hours later, Bob is in the army.
Chapters 20-22 Analysis
The gross injustices of the American justice system are exposed in Chapters 20 to 22, and as the impossibility of Bob living peacefully as a Black man within a white social system becomes clear, the theme of American Equality and Systemic Racism reaches its conclusion. At the beginning of this section, Alice finally agrees to marry Bob, which gives him temporary hope of achieving the upward economic and social mobility that he craves. Because of this hope, Bob decides to conform to the system and attempt to function successfully in it; Alice has made it clear that this is the only way that she will be able to be with him. He even commits to following Alice’s advice to apologize to Madge, even though it goes against his instincts. Bob tries to convince himself that by following Alice’s lead, he will be able to live in peace.
However, this is not to be. Bob makes his first earnest attempt to be submissive to the system by apologizing to Madge and attempting to get his old job back, but the system exposes its teeth and proves that it will never leave a Black man like him alone. Bob tries to apologize to Madge and she attempts to seduce him yet again; when Bob tells her that he does not want her, she screams that he has tried to rape her and watches delightedly as a mob of white men beats him. Bob went to find Madge in pursuit of peace but instead feels “buck-naked and powerless, stripped of [his] manhood and Black against the whole white world” (169).
Madge is the novel’s ultimate example of how whiteness can be weaponized to do harm to Black people, contributing significantly to Himes’s exploration of Racist Antagonism and Color Prejudice. It appears that Madge’s anger at Bob and desire to have him lynched has nothing to do with him calling her a “cracker bitch” (29), him coming to her apartment and physically assaulting her, or his earlier lust after her, but with the fact that he—a Black man—does not desire her white femininity. Madge prizes her whiteness and her sexuality as her most valuable commodities. This is even more pronounced for Madge, who is a working-class white woman who has limited power within society, too. By wielding her power over Bob at the beginning of the novel, she is able to feel less disenfranchised. Bob’s refusal to bow down before her whiteness angers her to the point of wanting to show him just how much the system will favor whiteness—even poor, working-class whiteness—over Blackness.
Ultimately, Madge’s whiteness wins. After Bob is beaten and escorted by a guard from the hospital back to the shipyard, he is shocked to learn that Madge has given sworn testimony and a warrant is out for his arrest on rape charges. The idea that he could spend up to 30 years in prison for a crime he thought about, but did not commit, fuels Bob’s poorly conceived escape. Despite his lived experience that should have taught him otherwise, Bob still believed that his word would be taken for truth and that the judicial system would realize Madge is lying. The notion that the racism Bob experiences is not just personal but systemic slaps him in the face in this moment. He realizes that no one—not his employer, or the people who know Madge is lying, or the justice system itself—will fight for him. The system exists not to uphold the truth but to defend whiteness. In the end, Bob accepts the option—which is not an option at all—of joining the army, finally fully understanding that until there is some kind of revolution, the only way to survive the current system as a Black man is to conform to it.
