Attaway, William - Bonnie J. Barthold (essay date 1981)
Bonnie J. Barthold (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "William Attaway, Blood on the Forge," in Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 164-68.
[In the following excerpt, Barthold discusses Attaway's "jazzlike use of images of fragmentation" in Blood on the Forge.]
Blood on the Forge begins on a Kentucky farm with only "one good strip of land" remaining, farmed by the Moss brothers—Big Mat, Melody, and Chinatown—and Big Mat's barren wife, Hattie. The barrenness of the land and of the woman signal the death of an agrarian and communal way of life. Big Mat's quarrel with a white man only hastens the Moss brothers' departure for the North, and they accept a steel-mill recruiter's offer to board a boxcar for the Allegheny River and a strikebound steel mill there.
Predominantly the narrative focuses on the destructive life in the mill community. The mill workers...
[The entire page is 1645 words long]
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