If He Hollers Let Him Go

Bob—now drunk and angry—arrives back at Madge’s hotel and sneaks up to her room. He knocks on the door and insists that Madge let him in. Madge refuses several times and tells him to leave, threatening to call the police. Bob starts hammering on the door, and she finally lets him in. Madge says he cannot stay because they will both get in trouble, but instead of leaving, Bob asks her to have a drink. 

Bob scrutinizes Madge’s appearance in her worn bathrobe and slippers. Rather than looking beautiful and seductive as she seemed in the light of day at the shipyard, she looks older, harder, and tired. Despite this realization, Bob moves in on her and traps her against the door. He tries to pin her down to have sex with her, but Madge continues to struggle. She gets an arm free and hits Bob in the face as they roll from the bed to the floor. Bob pins her down flat on her back. Madge suddenly stops struggling and says, “I dare you to, nigger. Just go ‘head. I’ll get you lynched right here in California” (137). Bob tells her to go to hell. Madge bursts out crying, asking herself why she let him in in the first place. 

Bob observes again that she “looks like hell” (137). He wonders what he had seen in her in the first place. Madge abruptly begins acting coy. She opens her robe, asking: “Ain’t I beautiful? Pure white” (137). She then teases: “You can’t have none unless you catch me” (138). She and Bob collide in a physical struggle again. Madge, once again pinned to the ground, looks Bob in the eyes wildly, saying: “All right, rape me then, nigger!” (138). At the sound of the word—rape—Bob leaps to his feet and flees. 

Bob makes it to his car but hears Madge’s voice from the window. “Wait,” she whispers, hurrying down to the car and asking for Bob to “let [her] in” (138). Bob refuses but decides to have the final word anyway: “You look like mud to me, sister, like so much dirt. Just a big beat bitch with big dirty feet. And if it didn’t take so much trouble I’d make a whore out of you” (139). This response makes Madge furious, and she threatens to report him to a policeman if she sees one, but Bob speeds away and does not look back.

Bob has another dream that night where a "white boy" and a "colored boy" are locked in a knife fight. The white boy begins chasing the colored boy and stabs him all over the head and neck. Bob knows it will just be a matter of time until the colored boy falls to the ground and bleeds to death, but the white boy just keeps chasing him, stabbing and laughing. 

Bob wakes up with yet another bad hangover. This hangover, however, gives him a strange sense of clarity, and he realizes he cannot win against white people: “Unless I found my niche and crawled into it, unless I stopped hating white folks and learned to take them as they came, I couldn’t live in America, much less expect to accomplish anything in it” (141). He realizes that black people can be proud of their heritage, love their race, and keep trying to rise up in America, but that they must always recognize their “nigger limit,” to “accept being black as a condition over which [they] had no control, then go on from there” (141). They have to believe that, if they were “good nigger[s]” (141)for a long time, white people would eventually let them in. But Bob recognizes that in order to believe that, one must also believe that white folks are generous, unselfish, and love black folks enough to want to share their world with them. In his experience, this is not true. Thus, Bob sees that while he has no choice but to believe in this myth, his mind cannot stop rebelling against it. 

Bob gets to work but feels sick and low. He thinks he never wants to see Madge again, but then changes his mind and decides he wants to have it out with her. When he runs into her, she is angry and mean. He loses his nerve to talk to her, particularly because Don, the mechanic who gave Madge’s address to Bob, is pressing Bob to find out if he went to Madge’s place and slept with her. Wandering around the ship, Bob runs into Herbie, the union master. Herbie asks Bob for the grievance that Bob wants to file about the incident with Madge but, feeling beat and worn down, Bob tells Herbie that all he wants is peace.

Bob leaves work to meet Alice for lunch. He reaches into the glove compartment to get his sunglasses and is terrified when he feels his gun. He knows he was under pressure, but suddenly he cannot believe he was pushed far enough to plan to kill a white man. Shaken, Bob meets Alice at a drive-in restaurant. They order food, and Bob asks Alice if she had a nice time with Tom Leighton the night before. Alluding to Bob going to see Madge the night before, Alice asks Bob the same question. Bob decides he does not want to fight and simply tells Alice he loves her. Alice is delighted and tells Bob that that is the first time he has told her he loved her without qualifying it. Bob agrees, and says he wonders why he seems to do everything wrong. He talks about feeling like a machine being run by white people, how every moment involves some white person controlling what will happen to him. He also talks about how pressured that makes him feel. Every time he tries to claim a little authority, in any situation, he gets slapped down. 

Alice says that this is simply one of the conditions of life. Bob knows this, but he still wants to feel some sense of control over his life. He does not want to think about his race all the time, but white people make him think about it in every way. Instead, Alice encourages Bob to strive to accomplish the things that he can accomplish as a black man and to do what he can to control his destiny within the patterns of segregation. Alice admits that they are restricted to the stipulations of segregation in all aspects of their existence that stem from the economy, but that the best parts of life are not commercial, and they have control over those parts. Spiritual values, virtues, home, and family, Alice claims, are not subject to segregation, and they will always have control over those things. Bob is hesitant to believe what Alice says is true, but he wants to marry her and feels that he must give in to her way of seeing things. Consequently, Bob proposes, and Alice says yes. They spend the rest of the lunch hour planning their future, and Bob is elated and at peace as he leaves Alice and drives back to work.