Allusion and Misdirection: Himes, “Meiosis,” and Everett’s erasure

In this article, I seek both to sketch Percival Everett’s use in erasure of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and to illuminate the curious section of erasure that appears under the heading “Àppropos de bottes,” in which the names of Himes and Bob Jones, the protagonist of If He Hollers, appear. I contend that these allusions, along with an array of others, are crucial to understanding the significance of the episode in its own right and to connecting the tale in meaningful ways to the larger novel and to My Pafology/Fuck, the book’s novel-within-the-novel.