The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The ...

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The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him
Go, The Street, and Invisible Man
Author(s): Richard Yarborough
Reviewed work(s):
Source: MELUS, Vol. 8, No. 4, The Ethnic American Dream (Winter, 1981), pp. 33-59
Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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The Quest for the American Dream in Three
Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers
Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man
Richard
Yarborough
America is a dream.
The Poet says it was promises.
-Langston Hughes, "Freedom's Plow"'
The experience of Afro-Americans in this country has been marked by
two major ironies which would seem to preclude any widespread, long-
term endorsement of that body of cultural ideals called the American
Dream. The first is the disappointing fact that the society which claims to
be founded upon the principles of freedom and equality nonetheless
supported a brutal chattel slave system for over two hundred years.
Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany frequently
alluded to this tragic inconsistency. With emancipation and the victory
of the North in the Civil War, however, it seemed to blacks that America
was finally beginning to fulfill the promise of its bright conception. Afro-
Americans felt that they would only have to follow the rules which
white society prescribed in order to attain the American Dream. It was at
this point that blacks on a large scale began to confront the second,
galling irony regarding their status in the United States. They discov-
ered that essentially the same racist distortions which had been used to
justify slavery now served to thwart the Afro-American's participation
in the great national drive toward prosperity and apparent fulfillment.
Despite severe disappointments, however, Afro-Americans have
generally been among the most fervent believers in the American
Dream. The primary source of this stubborn faith lies, oddly enough, in
the very racial prejudice which so sorely tests it. Most blacks perceive
that it is because of their race that they have been refused entrance into
the American sanctum sanctorum, that imaginary arena of freedom and
fair play where an individual may prove his or her worth and, upon
doing so, earn the security, peace, material comforts, and happiness
identified with success in the United States. Accordingly, pre-1920s
MELUS, Volume 8, No. 4 (Winter 1981)
33
34 RICHARDY ARBOROUGH
Afro-American novelists most frequently portray the failure of the
American Dream for the black as yet another result of racism in this
country. An important assumption underlying this particular treatment
is that the American system does indeed work. In other words, while
many white social critics have contended that the American game of
success is meaningless, that there are no winners, most Afro-American
writers have instead argued that the rules of the game have never been
fairly applied to blacks.
As a result, Afro-American novelists have had to perform a peculiar
kind of thematic gymnastics in order to reflect in their works both the
realistic awareness that racist oppression has persisted after slavery and
the idealistic faith in America as the land of opportunity for all. One
striking example of this delicate balancing act is Frank J. Webb's portray-
al of free blacks in mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia, The Garies and
Their Friends (1857). This novel is thematically torn by two ultimately
unreconcilable concerns. The first is Webb's endorsement of capitalist
individualism as a sure means to rise in America. At one point, the
affluent, heroic Mr. Walters observes to another member of the black
bourgeois community:
Do you ever find them [whites] sending their boys out as servants? No;
they rather give them a stock of matches, blacking, newspapers, or apples,
and start them out to sell them. What is the result? The boy that learns to
sell matches soon learns to sell other things; he learns to make bargains; he
becomes a small trader, then a merchant, then a millionaire.2
However, Webb also is committed to an accurate presentation of the
brutal racism in the North; Thus, he describes a white riot in violent,
horribly explicit detail.
The conclusion of the novel typifies his dilemma. On one hand, we
have the apparent validation of the mainstream American belief that
anyone can rise to prosperity. For instance, Kinch, a former street ur-
chin, evolves into a well-heeled dandy through the inheritance of his
father's property, which has dramatically escalated in value. Further,
the once embattled black characters seem again secure in their middle-
class status. Symbolically dominating the scene, however, is the invalid
Mr. Ellis, whose spiritual and physical crippling as a result of the riot
reminds us that the achievement of bourgeois success for the Afro-
American means little in the face of racial prejudice.3
Afro-American fiction in the twentieth century reveals the increasing
difficulty black writers have had in maintaining both an unflinching
willingness to confront white America's treatment of blacks and faith in
AFRO-AMERICAND REAMS 35
the American Dream. After four decades of innumerable promises upon
which America has almost inevitably reneged, the dialectical tension in
Afro-American thought between hope and despair begins to produce a
new synthesis: the agonizing recognition that white racism may forever
keep the American Dream out of the black's grasp.
The first modern Afro-American novel to embody this dispair, pain,
and rage is Richard Wright's Native Son (1940).4 It is no coincidence that
three black writers deeply influenced by Wright-Chester Himes, Ann
Petry, and Ralph Ellison-share an acute sensitivity to the frustrations
of the black individual striving for the American ideal of success. Fur-
ther, the resolutions of Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Petry's
The Street (1946), and Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) define the predomi-
nant reactions evoked by the failure of the Dream: the cynical acceptance
of defeat; explosive rage and then despair; and, finally, the desperate
hope that something of the American Dream can be salvaged.
Go West, young man.
-Horace Greeley
Swing low, chariot, come down easy,
Taxi to the Terminal Line;
Cut your engines, and cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone,
Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia,
Tidewater 4-10-0-0,
Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land
callin' and the poor boy's on the line.
-Chuck Berry, "The Promised Land"5
Physical mobility has always been an important facet of the American
Dream. Most Americans have seen the freedom to pick up and leave
their homes in search of better conditions as an inalienable right, and the
awesome geographical space of the North American continent has ac-
commodated their restlessness. For most of this nation's history, there
has been a frontier to serve as a safety valve for America's restive
energy.6 Even after the land resources have largely been exhausted,
spiritual equivalents (for example, outer space as "the new frontier" in
the 1960s) were found. Americans, the majority of whom are of immi-
grant stock, have never really settled down; they have become emi-
grants within their own country.
Afro-Americans have shared this national endorsement of flight as a
means to solve their problems. In her study of the great black migration
in the early twentieth century, Florette Henri notes that "American
blacks had always been moving from one part of the country to another,
36 RICHARD YARBOROUGH
and also out of the country, looking for freedom and opportunity."7 In
both the fugitive slave's escape from the South and the black emigration-
ist's search for a homeland, flight becomes an act of rebellion, a rejection
of oppression. For Americans, in general and for Afro-Americans in
particular, self-determined movement has been an important declara-
tion of independence.
The most important geographical movement in Afro-American cul-
ture has been northward, but, nonetheless, a large segment of black
society has shared America's fixation upon the West as the land of
promise, waiting to yield up its treasure-whether it be gold, oil, crops,
stardom, political or economic power, adventure, or even merely relief
from the settled society in the East.
One of the most vivid examples in Afro-American literature of the lure
of the frontier is Oscar Micheaux's autobiographical novel, TheC onquest
(1913). This work is especially relevant here, for in justifying his decision
to homestead, the narrator continually alludes to the opinion shared by
many Americans of the time that in the West the American Dream was
still alive and well. The protagonist's faith in the American way has
already been reinforced by his success in Chicago, where he has earned
$2,340 in an appropriately up-by-one's-bootstraps manner. Now, he
strikes out for new challenges:
The odd forty I drew out, and left the remaindero n deposit, packedm y
trunka nd bid farewellt o ArmourA venue and Chicago'sB lackB eltw ith its
beer cans, drunkenm en and women, and turnedm y face westwardw ith
the spirit of HoraceG reely [sic] before and his words "Go west, young
man, and grow up with the country"r ingingi n my ears. So westward I
journeyedt o the land of raw material,w hich my dreamsh ad picturedt o
me as the land of real beginning.8
The crucial premise underlying the protagonist's sanguine expectations
is that "if white people could possess such nice homes, wealth and
luxuries, so in time, could the colored people."9 This belief that race
cannot prevent success is the key to any acceptance by blacks of the
relevance of the American Dream for their own lives. Throughout much
of modern Afro-American fiction, this assumption is called into question
and frequently proven fallacious. Such optimism as that displayed by
the narrator of The Conquesti s actually an accurate indication of the
protagonist's nativete.
Chester Himes's If He HollersL et Him Go is the powerful examination
of one black man's painful growth from naivete to cynicism as he search-
es for the American Dream in Southern California. Bob Jones, the pro-
tagonist, moves to Los Angeles from Cleveland in the early 1940s, not
AFRO-AMERICADNR EAMS 37
just for better employment opportunities but for something far more
elusive and difficult to define-a secure sense of his own manhood. Bob
has become quite familiar with white American racism. Early in the
novel, he describes his previous encounters with prejudice: "Cleveland
wasn't the land of the free or the home of the brave either. That was one
reason why I left there to come to Los Angeles; I knew if I kept on getting
refused while white boys were hired from the line behind me I'd hang
somebody as sure as hell."10L os Angeles, however, promises to be an
open society which will allow him to start over. Arriving in California,
he optimistically believes that he has left his troubles behind: "I felt fine
about everything. Taller than the average man, six feet two, broad-
shouldered, and conceited, I hadn't a worry. I knew I'd get along" (IHH,
pp. 6-7).
What makes Bob's experiences in Los Angeles particularlyt roubling is
that his expectations are merely those shared by most of his fellow
countrymen. While he acknowledges the restrictions imposed upon him
because of his race, Bob cannot help but partake of the same values and
goals as other Americans:
I'd learned the same jive that the white folks had learned. All that stuff
aboutl ibertya nd justicea nd equality. ... All men are createde qual ....
Any person born in the United States is a citizen .... Learnedi t out the
sameb ooks, in the same schools .... I was a CharlesL indberghfa n when I
was a little boy, and thought George Washingtonw as the father of my
country-as long as I thought I had a country( IHH, pp. 141-142).
His inability to abandon the notions that "being born in America gave
everybody a certain importance" (IHH, p. 143), that he does indeed
have "a country," and that he is fully an American predetermines his
fate.
His first major disillusionment in California involves his search for
work. He comments: "It was the look on the people's faces when you
asked them about a job .... They just looked so goddamned startled
that I'd even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the
door and said, 'I can talk' " (IHH, p. 7). If, in Cleveland, he found it
difficult to be recognized as an American citizen, he finds his very
humanity denied in Los Angeles.
His anger and frustration turn to fear and anxiety with the internment
of the Japanese-Americans during the war. The sight of "little Riki
Oyana singing 'God Bless America' and going to Santa Anita with his
parents next day" epitomizes for Bob the awesome power white society
holds over his own head and the frightening ease with which that power
can be exercised. After Pearl Harbor, Bob becomes especially sensitive to
38 RICHARD YARBOROUGH
the "tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes." He
admits: "Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or
ignore. Every day I had to make one decision a thousand times: Is it now?
Is now the time?"( IHH, p. 7). The sheer nervous tension of maintaining a
state of constant mobilization frays Bob physically and emotionally.
After his initial disappointment, Bob strikes an uneasy truce with the
hostile white society in which he finds himself. He still believes that
some accommodation can be reached, that he can attain some degree of
success, American style. This qualified optimism is grounded in Bob's
sense of his own manhood, and his tough, desperate pride is tied
directly to three possessions which have typically buttressed the confi-
dence of American males throughout the twentieth century: his car, his
job, and his relationship with a woman. Himes describes how, in each
case, white America flaunts its power over Bob.
In wartime Los Angeles, Bob's '42 Buick Roadmaster is a sign of his
superior status; he comments, "rich white folks out in Beverly couldn't
even buy a new car now" (IHH, p. 13). Further, in his daily confronta-
tion with the whites who can flourish their ascendancy with a conde-
scending glance, Bob's car is a tool of aggression and an outlet for his
frustrations. The limitations of his Buick as a symbol of prestige and as a
source of power are brought home, however, the night he and his
girlfriend, Alice, are pulled over by two white motorcycle policemen.
The officers' insults and the fact that it is Alice who, using the political
clout of her father, finally gets the police off their backs, both remind
Bob of his impotence. After he and Alice have been taken to the police
station and fined, Alice exclaims angrily: "I wish I was a man." Bob's
cynical retort-"If you were a man what would you do?"-is directed as
much at himself as at Alice (IHH, p. 62).
The second important evidence of his own worth is his job as a
"leaderman" at the Atlas Shipyard. His feelings as he dresses for work
in the morning suggest the degree to which his position as a "key man"
in the war effort defines him as a valuable and potent man and assuages
somewhat his sense of helplessness: "Something about my working
clothes made me feel rugged, bigger than the average citizen, stronger
than a white-collar worker-stronger even than an executive. Important
too. It put me on my muscle" (IHH, p. 12). Despite his title, however,
Bob is confronted daily with the nominal nature of his authority. Not
only must he put up with members of his own black crew who blame
him for their mistakes, but he finds that he is the subordinate of every
white worker. His union representative is ineffective; his superior in-
sults him by telling a "darky" joke in his presence; and he must ac-
knowledge that a less qualified white leaderman can get the black crew
AFRO-AMERICAND REAMS 39
better jobs than he can. He learns his true status in the yard when he
calls Madge, a white, Texas-bred tacker who insultingly refuses to work
for him, a "crackerb itch" (IHH, p. 29). As a result of this exchange, he is
downgraded and threatened with the loss of his military deferment.
His most precious source of masculine pride and the situation that
most convinces him that he has a foot up on the ladder to American
middle-class prosperity is his relationship with Alice. While Bob is an
inveterate flirt with most of the black women he encounters, he believes
that Alice Harrison is something special: "It gave me a personal pride to
have her for my girl. And then I was proud of her too. Proud of the way
she looked, the appearance she made among white people; proud of
what she demanded from white people, and the credit they gave her;
and her position and prestige among her own people" (IHH, p. 10). Yet
Bob abhors the pompous superficiality of Alice's parents and her fat-
uous friends, and he is equally exasperated by the stiff social worker
manner Alice cannot seem to leave at her office. Their relationship is
further strained by a series of events, each of which seems designed to
mortify him. The first involves the harassment they receive when they
go to an elegant hotel for dinner. Then comes the confrontation with the
police. The ultimate insult stems from the more direct intervention of
white society in their relationship several days later. Incensed by the
racist behavior of whites, Bob seeks refuge at Alice's house, where he
must endure the glib comments of her white co-worker, Tom Leighton.
Bob is particularly aggravated by the white man's condescension, which
makes him "look like a goddamned fool" in front of Alice (IHH, p. 85).
When he later encounters Tom and Alice on their way to a date, he feels
that he is in danger of losing everything which defines his masculinity.
In his desperate need to retaliate for his humiliation, Bob first decides
to get revenge on a young white who struck him during a crap game.
Determined to make the man "feel as scared and powerless and unpro-
tected as I felt every goddamned morning I woke up," Bob finds that
having "a peckerwood's life in the palm of my hand ... made all the
difference" (IHH, pp. 37, 45). Soon, however, merely threatening the
white man no longer seems either satisfying or practical; confronting
white America's ultimate racial taboo, Bob turns his attention to Madge.
While there is something of the appeal of the sexually forbidden
underlying Bob's obsession with Madge, revenge is the strongest mo-
tive: "I was going to have to have her. I was going to have to make her as
low as a white whore in a Negro slum-a scummy two-dollar whore ....
I was going to have to so I could keep looking the white folks in the face"
(IHH, p. 116). Despite his resolution to get back at white society through
Madge, Bob is denied even this satisfaction, however, when her
40 RICHARDY ARBOROUGH
aroused cry of surrender-"All right, rape me then, nigger!"-literally
unmans him: "I let her loose and bounded to my feet. Rape-just the
sound of the word scared me, took everything out of me, my desire, my
determination, my whole build-up" (IHH, p. 138). Having been thwart-
ed in his every attempt to assert his manhood, Bob surrenders: "I was
through and I knew it; the white folks had won again and I wanted out"
(IHH, p. 139).
At the height of his pride, Bob has contended: "If I couldn't live in
America as an equal in the minds, hearts, and souls of all the white
people, if I couldn't know that I had a chance to do anything any other
American could, to go as high as an American citizenship would carry
anybody, there'd never be anything in this country for me anyway"
(IHH, p. 144). Now, however, his goals are much simpler: "All I want is
peace" (IHH, p. 150). Admitting defeat, Bob seems willing, at long last,
to resign himself to his second-class status. Alice and her circle of
bourgeois blacks exemplify how such an adjustment might be made:
"They hadn't stopped trying, I gave them that much; ... but they had
recognized their limit-a nigger limit" (IHH, p. 141). As agonizing as it
is for him to accept this "nigger limit," Bob also acknowledges: "(A)s
long as I was black I'd never be anything but half a man at best" (IHH, p.
153). Determined to make the best of his unavoidable plight, Bob prom-
ises Alice that he will swallow his pride, and he accepts the patronizing
advice of his white department supervisor, who tells him: "Take your
punishment like a man, then make a comeback. That's the Americanw ay,
my boy. Prove yourself" (IHH, p. 164; emphasis added).
In Himes's pessimistic view, however, Bob's decision to resign him-
self to the crumbs white society offers does not prevent the ultimate
destruction of his remaining ambitions. Accidentally trapped with
Madge in a locked cabin aboard a ship, Bob is victimized by her second
cry of "Rape," an accusation used for years to justify the emasculation of
black men. While, for a short time, he naively expects to be somehow
vindicated, Bob finally admits that he has no chance: "The whole struc-
ture of American thought was against me; American tradition had con-
victed me a hundred years before" (IHH, p. 175). The idealism which
has carried Bob to California is dead. He ends up "pressed, cornered,
black, as small and weak and helpless as any Negro sharecropper facing
a white mob in Georgia" (IHH, p. 182).
Mauled physically and spiritually, Bob is finally bereft of all idealism,
hope, anger, and even hatred. In the closing scenes, when he is offered
the choice of going to prison or taking part in a war about which he cares
little, he must fight down hysterical laughter at the bitter irony of his
fate. After traveling West in the attempt to attain his portion of the
American Dream-"just to be a man" (IHH, p. 190), he must enlist in
AFRO-AMERICAND REAMS 41
the Jim Crow Army which has long advertised its ability to "make" men.
His final words-"I'm still here" (IHH, p. 191)-mark the nadir of his
aspirations; he has survived: that is all he can claim.
Or does it explode?
-Langston Hughes, "Dream
Deferred"1'
(D)iligencei s the mothero f goodluck,a s Poor
Richard says and God gives all things to
industry.
-Benjamin Franklin, "The Way to
Wealth"14
A crucial component of the American Dream is the conviction that the
United States is the land of infinite economic opportunity. This myth is
firmly based on the widespread belief in the inherent justice of the U.S.
economic system-that is, that hard work and dedication not only can
but will lead to success.
In her novel, The Street, Ann Petry demonstrated that for Lutie John-
son, an industrious, intelligent, sensitive, and idealistic young black
woman, the American Dream is impossible. A staunch, real-life propo-
nent of the Dream, J. D. Rockefeller, once remarked: "They have but to
master the knack of economy, thrift, and perseverance and success is
theirs."13 In The Street, Lutie displays the necessary "economy, thrift,
and perseverance"; however, her path leads not to prosperity but to
murder, despair, and the abandonment of her every aspiration, includ-
ing her dreams for her son.
Like Himes's Bob Jones, Lutie Johnson has been raised to accept
mainstream American values. Lutie's goals are grounded in the tradi-
tional optimistic American view of economic achievement traceable in-
evitably back to Benjamin Franklin. Lutie's explicit allusion to a famous
scene from Franklin's Autobiography reinforces the conventionality of her
ambitions. Walking home one day with a bag of rolls,
she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread. And
grinned thinking, You and Ben Franklin. You ought to take one out and
start eating it as you walk along 116th Street. Only you ought to remember
while you eat that you're in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty
long number of years ago. Yet she couldn't get rid of the feeling of self-
confidence and she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a
little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she.14
The last sentence of this excerpt is crucial, for it is this confidence which
best characterizes Lutie throughout most of the novel.