L.A. NOVELS YOU MIGHT READ #2

Second listing in my group of ten:

If any of you have ever read the hard-boiled fiction of Chandler or Hammett, you should give Chester Himes a try. He had a brief career as a screen-writer for Warner Brothers, terminated when Jack Warner heard about him and said "I don't want no niggers on this lot." (Mike Davis, City of Quartz, pg 43, Verso 2006).

Himes later wrote in his biography:"Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear. I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate."

If He Hollers Let Him Go was published in 1945, about an African American shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II. "The story spans four days in the life of Bob Jones, a newcomer to L.A. from Ohio, who has some college education, and works as a crew leader in a naval shipyard. Jones lives in a time when black workers experience a new-found authority as supervisors and garner decent wages as a result of union efforts. However for Bob Jones this is no escape from the pressures of racism. It quickly becomes apparent that he was promoted only in order to facilitate the cooperation of black workers in the war-time effort. He is forced to deal with anti-communist paranoia, resentment from whites on the floor at working on the same jobs as "negro boys", and the vicious baiting of the black workers by white females. These manifest as fears which invade his dreams, his aspirations, and his passions. His dream of making something of himself in California is jeopardized as he reacts with emotion to the actions of the white people around him. He fights back the urges to fight, to kill, and to rape as ways to overcome the power that "colour" has over him. There are also some smart references to jazz." From Wikipedia.