Chester Himes’, If He Hollers Let Him Go, provides a graphic window into the world of racism where his protagonist, Bob Jones, outlines personal dreams that serve as a framework to recreate the reality of the overwhelming prejudice prevalent in the 1940s. The novel unfolds over a course of four to five days, where each day begins with a nightmare encountering various forms of racism. Throughout each dream, Jones elicits scenes of violence, with each one escalating in visual description and immoral degree, along with his personal reflections after he wakes up. Himes’s structuring of the novel suggests a realistic representation of racism as seen through Jones’s unconscious state, where the dream sequences represent racism so pervasive that Jones cannot escape it even in his own unconscious; there is no freedom for him even within his own mind, and the dreams operate as an embellished glimpse into the reality of the chauvinistic world that Jones inhabits. Chapter One opens with Jones’s first dream, where a man asks him if he would like to have “a little black dog with stiff black gold-tipped hair and sad eyes that looked something like a wire-haired terrier” (Himes 1). Jones describes how the dog had “a piece of heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck,” and how it “broke loose” to where the man “ran and caught it and brought it back and gave it to [him] again” (1). The dog symbolizes Jones, and possibly even all of black society. Wire-haired terriers, in their natural state, are very shaggy and unkempt creatures; they need masters to instruct and groom them in order to be accepted and presentable in society. The terrier and Jones are analogous in that they are seen as things to be tamed via social construction; Jones is treated as an animal as opposed to a person with human emotion and thought because he transcends the norm by being a black man in a world dominated by whites. The “stiff hair” and “sad eyes” that characterize the dog translates to Jones since his encounters with whites catalyzed primal urges of fear and anger that ultimately resulted in dejection and futility, alongside a stern hatred for all whites. Furthermore, the dog breaking loose clearly implies that there was something to run away from. Throughout the novel, Jones both metaphorically and literally attempts to run away from the circumstances of his black identity, where the dream is the first dramatic depiction of his trying to escape the harrowing confines of racism. The “heavy stiff wire twisted about its neck” creates a striking image of the dog being sturdily restrained from the world, as it also implies that racism is a rigid and unyielding practice that allows no room to learn of freedom without choking in the process. The fact that the dog is caught after having broken free and is returned to the man – an ultimately superior being – suggests that racism cannot be evaded. Jones’s second dream involved “two poor peckerwoodsbeating [him] with lengths of rubber hose” (69). He describes his ineffective attempts to stand up and run away, and how when they were going to stop, “The president of the shipyard said, ‘Niggers can take it as long as you give it to them’” (69). He goes on to explain how “the coloured people looked at the peckerwoods with dull hatred” and how after a fraudulent speech from the president, “they went away feeling good toward [the president] and hating the peckerwoods” (69). This dream underscores the first episode of violence that victimizes Jones into feeling helpless and despairing. Because the president is able to turn the callous situation into one that places him under a positive light, the dream further expounds on the futility of gaining justice in an unethical world. The policemen are described to be “laughing,” which Himes uses as a device to critique racism to its core by emphasizing the fetish for power; once attained, it is used in a condescending manner. The third dream is by far the longest and most descriptive in terms of how Jones describes the setting around him. Jones loses himself in trying to understand why he “had half a dozen or so grapefruit wrapped in a grey vest and a .45-calibre short-barrelled revolver” in his hands, and in doing so, he physically loses track of Alice’s whereabouts. In trying to find where she has gone, he encounters “a weedy park that slanted down to a river the park was hilly and rocky and covered with a dense growth of scrub and millions of swine with bony sharp spines and long yellow tusks running about in the brush” (100-101). This type of landscape is indicative of the type of world that Jones lives in. Los Angeles is not a mundane flat land constituted of one element, but rather one that is characteristic of hills, turns, slants, and other aspects of wild nature that allude to the intensity of Jones’s obstacles as a black man living in a white world.