Anagnorsis in "If He Hollers Let Him Go"

When we first meet Bob in the novel he is troubled by the Japanese American citizens that are being detained in internment camps during World War II. He is suffering from anxiety attacks every morning, and he states, “Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I had seen them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me, Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s dark son, that started me to getting scared” (Himes 3). From the very beginning of the narrative we can see that Bob doesn’t feel safe in the “white world” he lives in. He doesn’t believe that he has any control over his destiny; he can be taken “up by the roots” without a chance to defend himself. This means that Bob can trust no one and every time he leaves his home he will be anticipating a challenge. Throughout the novel we are witness to a multitude of Bob’s paranoid, anxiety-ridden thoughts about how the white man is going to take him down, and it all finally comes to a head when he is falsely accused of raping Madge and consequently beaten and arrested.  Bob’s anagnorisis, or self recognition, becomes so clear to him. He is no longer just afraid of having trouble with the white people he has to interact with on a daily basis, but of America as a whole. He states, “But now I was scared in a different way. Not of the violence... But of America, of American justice” (Himes 187). He had been right all along, but he realizes that it’s not just the people he works with or lives in L.A. with that he needs to fear, but the broader ideology of the country he lives in. He realizes that the psychic structures of slavery still exist.