Hello, my name is Annalice Weatherly, and I am a student at LaGuardia Community college.  This blog is for my class ENG 260, The Novel; in it, are my related answers to a specific part of the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go by Himes Chester.

If He Hollers Let Him Go, is a story of a colored man who faces a lot of obstacles and lives in fear for everyday in his life as a consequence to the color of his skin.

The ship closet’s  scene when Bob and Madge are discovered together is where one of  the catharsis scenes of the novel happens; in that scene, the readers experience so many tragic emotions such as fear, pity, anger, and the impression of a white female being raped by a black male. “Help! Help! My God, help me! Some white man, help me! I’m being raped” (Himes 180). Madge screaming for help is supposedly an indication of fear. Allegedly, she is under attack and needs help. Depend on the reader’s thoughts, he/she might sympathize with her because she is supposed to be a raped victim. On the hand, one might pity Bob because he is discovered in what appears to be a sexual scene between him, (a black man) and a white woman in the early 1940s where consent sexual relationships between blacks and whites didn’t exist.  If that was to happen, it would simply be called raped and they would be dire consequences to be paid.

Madge screams, “Some white man, help me” (Himes 180)! The words “white man” are Madge’s ways of stating out her help preferences. She is also reminding Bob of his status and values in her world; a world where it does not make a difference if Bob is a male and she is a female. Whether female or not, Madge dominates over him and she can easily get him hang simply because she is white and he is black. In a normal circumstance if a female is in fear of being raped and screams for help, she does not discriminates against her helper. However, in Madge’s world, she and her despicable character rightly believe whites are superior to blacks because that is what her society teaches her. Hence, instead of just screaming for help, she screams, some’ white man’, help me! Bob’s skin color, which is black, classifies him as a fiend that the “whites” need to protect themselves from before he gets the chance to commit a monstrous act against them.