William Attaway (1911–1986)

A searing and brutal story of three brothers who travel from rural Kentucky to the steel mills of Pennsylvania in 1919, during the Great Migration. What at first seems like an escape from the racism, near-slavery, and oppression of the share-cropping South turns out to be nearly the same thing just in another form.

This story was unrelenting in its harshness and grim reality, from white farmers, union organizers, union breakers, whores, drunks, black migrants, white immigrants, violence, and danger. The unraveling of the relationship among the three brothers was sad but unsurprising, as nothing good and true could possibly survive in the conditions in which they found themselves.

An important - and strongly told - novel, that should be better known.… (more)

The early part of the twentieth century saw huge upheavals in the US. The south faced economic decline. Black sharecroppers facd a hopeless situation of debt and early death working for white landowners who controlled so many aspects of their lives. The solution for many was to head north for paid hourly work in what became known as the Great Migration. At the same time, immigrants from Eastern Europe were pouring into the northeast, the first place the boats docked. Poor whites from the south were also heading north looking for work in the ever increasing number of factories and mills.

Blood on the Forge takes these groups and throws them together in the steel mill town of Vaughan Pennsylvania. Attaway's main characters are the three Moss brothers from Kentucky. The oldest, Big Mat, had murdered the overseer. That same day, his brothers Melody and Chinatown had made arrangements with a jackleg recruiter from the north to board a train north for work. Big Mat, fleeing for his life, joined them, leaving behind his wife Hattie. The five day journey in a sealed train is the first intimation of what is to come.

The Moss brothers' new lives throw them together with the Slavs and a new kind of racial tension. The immigrants looked down on the blacks not on traditional American grounds of race, but on economic ones. They feared they would lose work to these lower paid men. This was a real concern in 1919, the year in which the novel is set. The push for unionization was strong, and blacks were used as scab labour. Management would bring in trainloads of them from the south as a silent threat, whenever a strike looked likely. Walking down the street their first day in town, the brothers realized "In the eyes of all the Slavs was a hatred and contempt different from anything they had ever experienced in Kentucky."

While none of the three brothers was afraid of the punishing physical work, there were real differences. Work in Kentucky had been outdoors, with the rhythms of the seasons and contact with the natural world. "What men in their right minds would leave off tending green growing things to tend iron monsters?" In the south, the brothers and Hattie had lived together in their shack. Here they lived in a dorm, with no sense of a home life. Danger in the south had been from lynch mobs. Here it was ever present in their work "... furnace gas, electric shock, falls into the pit, slides of piled iron on the narrow gauge railways". Without a home life, the empty hours outside work were filled with card games, dog fights, corn liquor and trips to visit the women of Mex town.

Through it all is the leitmotif of the blues and Melody's guitar, the music that sings of everything that has been lost, even when there are no words to express it, until one day even the music is gone.

No happy ending could be expected here, and none is given. The brothers are destroyed physically and spiritually. There is no nostalgia here for the south. As the child of black parents who left Mississippi for Chicago, Attaway knew better. There is however, a powerful sense of loss for a time before unfettered capitalism governed life. More than that, there is a real concern both for the migrant workers' ability to earn an honest living and a decent life, and for those left behind with even less opportunity to improve their lot.… (more)

What a perfect novel. I was blown away by the story and once again found myself thanking whatever God that birthed NYRB books. My library is filled with great finds that NYRB has chosen to resurrect. "Blood on the Forge" is one of the best depictions of the horrors of factory life in the early part of the 20th century. The narrative and prose is visceral, it is like reading an open wound. James Baldwin blasted it for not showing any redemption for the characters. The narrative (and history) answers for itself, there never was any redemption for black steel workers.… (more)