Discussed in this essay:

Chester B. Himes: A Biography, by Lawrence P. Jackson. W. W. Norton. 640 pages. $35.

Early in Chester Himes’s first and best-known novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), the brown-skinned narrator, Bob, takes his light-skinned love interest, Alice, on a surprise date to a fancy hotel restaurant. Alice is a member of the black bourgeoisie, the daughter of a prominent physician; Bob is working-class, a leaderman at a Los Angeles shipyard. As he pulls his Buick up to the restaurant, her resistance leads him to suspect that Alice, a social climber, may have dined there…