Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, racism, misogyny, and anti-gay bias. The guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word, which Himes uses to highlight and critique racism in the USA.

Chapter 1 begins with the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Robert “Bob” Jones, summarizing three dreams he is having. Each dream involves a tense encounter with white men. In one dream, a man gives Bob a dog, but Bob cannot pay for it; in the second dream, white cops interrogate Black workers about the alleged murder of their white co-worker; and in the third dream, Bob asks a couple of white men for a job, but they laugh at him and refuse because he does not own any tools.

Bob awakens and does not immediately remember his dreams, instead thinking that “there [is] no meaning to anything” (6). The intense race trouble in Los Angeles since the beginning of World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor has caused Bob to feel overwhelming fear when he wakes up every morning. Though Bob managed to get a job as a leaderman—also known as a subforeman—at the Atlas Shipyard, he has observed Japanese people and Black people being refused decent work in LA since Pearl Harbor.