SOURCE: "Migration: William Attaway and Blood on the Forge," in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968, pp. 47-64.

There persists to this day a widely held belief that the deep South, with its brutal casts system and its savage history of racial atrocities, represents for Negroes an image of steaming hell. Such a view is constantly reinforced by spokesmen for civil rights organizations and activists of various liberal persuasions. It serves their political convenience and humanitarian goals, which is all to the good, but unfortunately it muddles their thinking. For it is grounded on the assumption that people are political and economic entities whose motivations and behavior may be simplistically understood. Since Negroes have been systematically exploited and oppressed in the South, it follows they must hate the South that has persecuted them. There are partial truths here—how else explain the vast northward migrations that have been taking place over the past fifty or so years? But what of the large numbers who have stayed behind? Partial truths are not satisfactory to the artist, for he understands that people often leave the place of the origins not simply out of hatred, but because they want to continue to love their homes. And they carry their love with them to the dismal ghettos of the North and cherish it all the more for their adversity. Jean Toomer, for all his woozy romanticism, persuades because his South represents a heartfelt need, and even racial militants like Richard Wright, may, on occasion, speak lyrically of "down-home" times. They miss especially the soil, the seasons, the sense of community they once knew; they regale one another with stories and fables and legends of family, friends, and relatives they left behind; and they attempt to adapt their older ways to the anarchy of city life. Frequently they return South for visits in order to renew themselves.

Calvin Hernton, in a recent book of essays, describes the mixed feelings of some of these visitors:

The fact that Negroes are alienated from the broader life of the South and its deeper mysteries does not frequently pull them away, but binds them ever more closely to the bosom of Down-Home. The South is the mother-matrix out of which and in which the Negro's mind has been fashioned; it is at the same time the festering ache in the republic of his heart. This, more than anything else, is why they go back.

Such ambivalence has seldom been expressed with more skill or emotional impact than in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), a narrative describing the first stage of the Negro's journey North from his ancestral home. It recounts the experiences of the three brothers. Moss in a steel-mill town in western Pennsylvania after leaving their Kentucky hill-country tenant farm during World War I. In the course of the novel one of the brothers is killed, and as the book closes the two remaining brothers move on to the city, where they hope to acquire new roots.

The novel not only records a critical moment in the Negro's history but expands its significance by reference to some of the larger events of the American experience. It takes into account the looming strife between incipient labor unions and the steel companies, the psychology and culture of east European immigrants as they work alongside Southern Negroes, and the specific work conditions under which they all struggle. But it would be a mistake to regard Blood on the Forge as a tract, for Attaway rendered the usual subject matter of the proletarian novel into a work of art. He transcended his materials to describe a strange odyssey of the human spirit—without losing several familiar sociological truths. Indeed, what may puzzle the reader is a certain cold realism combined with what can only be described as fervored romantic pessimism.

The failure of the novel to attain popularity may perhaps be ascribed to this paradoxical achievement. On the face of it, Blood on the Forge—even its title—suggests simply another of the interminable working-class novels dealing with the downtrodden and their efforts to succeed to a dignified life. Or perhaps the novel was read as naturalistic fiction, but because it did not quite fit the "up-lift" formula of its day, it was ignored and relegated to the dustbin of the ideologically confused. Whatever the reasons, it is clear that neither the "aesthetes" who wanted their art to eschew all sociological comment, nor the "socially committed" who wanted their art to point the way, would have looked favorably on Blood on the Forge, since in form and subject matter it seems to lie somewhere in a no man's land. Attaway has ideological axes to grind, but they are honed in peculiarly traditional American accents. He urges the primacy of the life of the soil over the life-denying machine, and projects the American image of men of different nationalities and colors working and living together. For all that, his books may have appeared a little foreign to American readers. Possibly the publication of Richard Wright's more sensational Native Son the preceding year had something to do with it. Wright's novel was less polished, but it contained rather startling revelations for white readers unused to racial complexities. The American reading public apparently could take only one Negro at a time. Wright became a "spokesman"; Attaway never published another novel.

Attaway prepared the way for Blood on the Forge with Let Me Breathe Thunder, a novel he published two years earlier in 1939. In one sense Attaway is less inhibited in his first book because he is writing primarily about white characters whose point of view would not be readily understood as racial. Yet his protagonists, hobo migrant farm workers, are Negroes under the skin—pariahs, consumed at the same time with wanderlust and the desire to stay put. Their agony is a Negro agony, and their allusions to race problems are more "inside" than Attaway might have cared to admit. They speak on more than one occasion of interracial sex and its conspiratorial acceptance in middle-class communities, of the various kinds of racial prejudice they meet throughout the country—and the fact that only hoboes do not appear to discriminate; of the private humiliations "outsiders" experience in a bourgeois milieu, and above all of their uneasiness in accommodating themselves to the patterns of American life, and their desire not to do so. They are the alienated, the uncommitted, whose discontents may one day be marshaled toward revolution—but not necessarily of the doctrinaire, ideological variety. They do not yet know what they want, but they know what they dislike. Once they are aware of what they seek, they are perhaps capable of changing their world.

Attaway here does not understand his people. His solution, like Toomer's, is a return to the soil. A character named Sampson, who owns orchards and farm lands, has suffered considerably during his life; his wife and sons have died and he lives alone with an adolescent daughter. But his strong sense of identification with the land serves to renew him and give him perspective and emotional balance. Sampson is portrayed most sympathetically, but Attaway cannot make him ring altogether true. And the hoboes whom he asks to stay with him on the land cannot believe in him either; as the novel closes, they leave to try their luck elsewhere. Attaway's inability to make Sampson believable stems as much from anachronism as from failure of craftsmanship. The American dream of the independent farmer was outmoded by the Depression years, and Attaway was simply unable to cope with his nostalgia.

The plot of Let Me Breathe Thunder is unsophisticated and sometimes Hollywoodishly sentimental. It deals with two hardened migratory farm workers in Washington State who adopt as their companion a lost, orphaned ten-year-old Mexican-American youth. Hi Boy, the name they have given him, speaks no English at first, rides the rods with them, and comes to adore Step, the more romantic and volatile of the two. At one point Hi Boy grinds a fork into his hand in order to prove to Step (who rather disapproves of the child as an unnecessary encumbrage) that he has the fortitude to bear the vicissitudes of the migratory life. The three companions settle later on Sampson's farm in Yakima, where Step rather reluctantly falls in love with Anna, Sampson's daughter. Their place of assignation is the home of a Negro woman, Mag, who owns brothels and considerable property in Yakima. In the course of events, Anna is rather dramatically discovered awaiting Step in Mag's house, and Step and his companion and Hi Boy flee in a boxcar. As they travel east across the country, Hi Boy's hand swells up from his self-inflicted wound. The men do everything they can to save him but he dies. Step and his companion conceal the body under a tarpaulin in a boxcar headed for New Mexico, Hi Boy's birthplace, then continue east to Kansas to seek new work.

The novel celebrates the loyalty and decency of men on the move, and the essential virtues of the life of the soil. Attaway's Negro themes, as we have seen, are muted and disguised, which allows him to speak the language of protest without using its rhetoric. In shying away from making his main characters Negroes, Attaway was perhaps fearful of having his novel labeled protest fiction. The two Negro characters who do appear in the novel have no especial "Negro" traits, and although one of them is nearly lynched for the supposed attempted rape of a white girl, scarcely any allusion is made to his race. It appears as if Attaway were bending over backwards to assure his readers that he is not writing "sociology." Such a position is absurd, since any reader would naturally associate lynchings and imaginary sex crimes with race. The novel falters on other counts: the characters rarely spring to life, and their situations vaguely suggest those Steinbeck described two years earlier in Of Mice and Men. Yet for all that, the narrative does possess a certain verve, and the prose is economical and clean in the Hemingway manner—objective but replete with undertones of irony and sadness.

In Blood on the Forge, the Hemingway style is transformed by Negro tones and rhythms. As the novel traces the deterioration of the Negro peasant under the crush of industrial life, Attaway rings changing images of the natural Southern landscape against the hearths, blast furnaces, and smoking chimneys of the steel-mill town. Implicit in the language is a kind of hell-death-decay imagery. His "green men" glance about them upon their arrival in Allegheny County and remember their former homes, the red clay hills, where "there was growing things everywhere and crab-apple trees bunched—stunted but beautiful." What they see now is an "ugly, smoking hell out of a backwoods preacher's sermon." Later they ask, "Where are the trees? They so far away on the tops of the low mountains that they look like the fringe on a black wear-me-to-a-wake dress held upside down against the sky." Attaway foreshadows the disintegration of black men under these conditions when the brothers, on their first day in the Pennsylvania community, spy a Negro whore approaching them on the street. At first they are attracted, but as she passes alongside, they are nearly overcome by a sickening odor. They are told afterward that one of her breasts is rotting away.

The reduction of the brothers begins almost immediately. Surrounded by rusty iron towers, brick stacks, magnets, traveling cranes, and steam shovels, they appear even to themselves physically diminished in size:

They had always thought of [Mat, the eldest] as big and powerful as a swamp tree. Now, in their eyes, he was getting smaller and smaller. Like spiral worms, all their egos had curled under pressure from the giants around them. Sooner or later it came to all the green men.

Attaway does not, however, confine this effect entirely to Negroes. The other workers in the mills—Irish, Italians, Slovaks, and Ukrainians—in one sense make better adjustments to industrial life. They raise families—for them their children are "growing things"—while the Negroes make no attempt to send home for their wives and children. Yet the white workers fare scarcely better: their children fornicate and commit incest in the weeds outside their homes, and their grown daughters become whores.

Steel, the indestructible symbol of industry, assumes a powerful impersonal force, brutalizing and degrading to the human spirit.

The fire and flow of metal seemed an eternal act which had grown beyond men's control. It was not to be compared with crops that one man nursed to growth and ate at his own table. The nearness of a farmer to his farm was easily understood. But no man was close to steel. It was shipped across endless tracks to all the world. On the consignment slips were Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, rails for South America, tin for Africa, tool steel for Europe. This hard metal held up the new world. Some were shortsighted and thought they understood. Steel is born in the flames and sent out to live and grow old. It comes back to the flames and has a new birth. But no one man could calculate its beginning or end. It was old as the earth. It would end when the earth ended. It seemed deathless.

But if Attaway deplores the evils of the industrial North, he does not conversely romanticize the virtues of the pastoral South. Unlike Toomer, he savagely portrays the South as being too oppressive for Negroes. In the first part of the novel the three brothers live together (with Hattie, Mat's wife) as tenant farmers in the Kentucky red-clay hills. They are on the verge of starvation and enslaved in debt. Even farming is largely useless because most of the topsoil has been washed away over the course of years. What remains for the brothers is the memory, the idea, the "dream" of the land as it must have been before they and the land were exploited by racist owners. The erosion of the land suggests the erosion of their morale which, in a sense, washes them off the land. The immediate cause of their hasty departure, however, is a beating administered by Mat to a white overseer. In order to escape the inevitable lynch mob, the brothers go North to the steel mills. Circumstances keep Mat from taking Hattie along, and Mat's separation from his wife signals the beginning of the dissolution of their family life.

The Kentucky sequence serves to introduce the major characters, who together suggest a composite Negro folk personality. Melody, who will manage best in the ordeal ahead, is sensitive and poetic. He is so named because of his skill with the guitar and because he is capable of articulating in song the folk life of the peasant. Chinatown is simple, lazy, sensual, and hedonistic. He lives by outward symbols; his greatest source of pride is his gold tooth, because, as he puts it later, it shines and smiles at him. Mat, the dominant figure of the group, is huge, brooding, and sullen. All his life he has suffered insults and humiliation at the hands of whites, but he has managed for the most part to suppress his rage and adopt a glazed expression when he is most hurt. An intensely religious man, Mat reads the Bible constantly to discover the causes of his agony. He believes he is cursed because he was conceived in sin, and that the curse has manifested itself in Hattie's inability to give birth to a child. Six times pregnant, Hattie has "dropped" her baby each time before it was born—and this is the central metaphor that supports Attaway's main theme, for Hattie's infertility corresponds to the infertility of the Southern soil that can no longer give sustenance to Negro life. Hence the brothers seek to sink roots in soil elsewhere. Insofar as they cannot do so, they will diminish and wither.

The second part of the novel relates the journey of the brothers to Pennsylvania—crouched and huddled in a dark boxcar with numerous other Negroes who are being brought North to work in mills.

Squatted on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for market, riding in the dark for what might have been years, knowing time only as dippers of warm water gulped whenever they were awake, helpless and dropping because they were headed into the unknown and there was no sun, they forgot even that they had eyes in their heads and crawled around in the boxcar, as though it were a solid thing of blackness.

The screech, the rattle, the roar of the train, the fetid air, the smell of urine demoralized the men. "The misery that stemmed from them was a mass experience." Not even Mat could "defend his identity against the pack." Chinatown whimpers, terrified that someone in the dark may try to steal his gold tooth. He tells Melody that "without it I ain't nobody." Nor can Melody play his guitar and sing in the deafening noise. It is as if the train journey has suddenly and shockingly severed them from all connection with the past—a feeling not unlike what their African ancestors must have experienced in the holds of the slave ships. Yet in another sense the boxcar is a kind of womb preparing to disgorge them into a new life.

But the life of the steel mills is even more dehumanizing than the one they have fled. Once the green men overcome their initial bewilderment at the sterile, ugly grayness of the community, they attempt to acclimate themselves. They learn from bunkhouse talk how to survive in their dangerous work. They feel the hostility of the white workers, who fear—with justification—that the Negroes have been transported North in order to weaken the union. They learn above all the drudgery of the mill, the tedium, the immense physical stamina required of steel workers on twelve-hour shifts. Their off hours at first are spent sleeping, but soon they begin to enjoy dice games in the bunkhouses, drinking corn whiskey, "whoring" in Mex Town, and attending dog fights. Even Mat allows himself to be drawn into these frivolities after he learns by letter that Hattie has lost her seventh baby. Melody has meanwhile fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old Mexican-American prostitute, Anna, whose earthy nature is adulterated somewhat by her pathetic longings for dance-hall dresses and high-heeled shoes. When Melody fails to satisfy her at their first encounter, she throws herself at Mat, whose brute strength and courage in a melee at the dog fights had rescued her from physical harm.

In certain respects Mat appears to adjust more easily to the life of a steel worker than this brothers. His physical strength is put to the test, and he proves himself more than equal to it. He wins a grudging respect among his fellow workers, and his self-abasement under the glare of the white man seems to disappear. Yet after breaking with his puritanical, Bible-oriented moorings, Mat will need something more than the knowledge that he can stand up to any white man in order to sustain his emotional balance.

Chinatown, on the other hand, makes the worst adjustment. His gold tooth does not count for much in the gray steel community. Nor can he, in his casual Southern way, easily withstand the pressures and tensions of the world he has entered. He misses the out-of-doors, the feel of the earth beneath his bare feet, the sun and the warmth. Melody tries to keep the brothers together but is troubled by a sense of loss. He cannot play his guitar and sing as he once did. He is aware of a need for other melodies, other rhythms in his new environment, yet he cannot quite catch them. His impotence with Anna suggests the signal impotence of all three brothers in their new life.

There is a remarkable soliloquy in this section of the novel, delivered by a crippled Negro named Smothers. Smothers has lost the use of his legs in an accident in the mills some years before, but he is retained on the job by the steel company as a watchman. He is regarded tolerantly by his fellow workers despite his obsessive tirades against steel. Smothers is prophetic—a crippled Tiresias announcing the apocalypse if men persist in their materialist pursuits. His harangues restate the view implicit at the start of the novel that the earth gives moral and spiritual sustenance to men, and that its destruction transgresses nature and denies men their potentialities. On one occasion he rises in the bunkhouse to utter the following words:

It's wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground don't like it. It's the hell-and-devil kind of work. Guy ain't satisfied with usin' the stuff that was put here for him to use—stuff on top of the earth. Now he got to git busy and melt up the ground itself. Ground don't like it, I tells you. Now they'll be folks laugh when I say the ground got feelin'. But I knows what it is I'm talkin' about. All the time I listen real hard and git scared when the iron blast holler to git loose, an' them big redhead blooms screamin' like the very heart o' the earth caught between them rollers. It jest ain't right….

Can't blame the ground none. It give warnin'. Yessir, they was warnin' give a long time ago. Folks say one night there's somethin' fall right outen the sky, blazin' down, lightin' up this ol' river in the black o' night…. A solid hunk o' iron it be, big around as a house, fused together like it been worked by a puddler with a arm size of a hundred-foot crane. Where it come from? Where this furnace in the sky? You don't know. I don't know. But it were a warning to quit meltin' up the ground.

Later in the same section, Attaway describes a dog fight which the brothers attend along with other workers. The event is particularly savage but evidently serves to relieve the spectators of their built-up murderous frustrations. Its effect on Mat, however, is quite the opposite, as he begins to strike out wildly and indiscriminately at the other workers like a starved dog loosed from its leash.

The passage of time brings the further decline of the brothers. Mat has rented a shack and is now living with Anna. He has given up all thoughts of sending for Hattie and has left his Bible behind in the bunkhouse. Melody broods over the loss of Anna and schemes to get her back. He calls on her while Mat is working at the mill. Anna suspects his motives, and her suspicions are confirmed when he announces that he wants to give Mat a letter from Hattie. Anna wrestles with him to take the letter away from him. Exhausted and unsuccessful, she gives up the fight and she and Melody make love. It soon becomes clear that Anna is not happy living with Mat, who does not allow her to go out and show off the sequined dress and high-heeled shoes he bought her with money he had been saving for Hattie. The next day Anna disappears, and when she returns two days later Mat assumes she has been "lying" with someone and beats her savagely. Actually she has been lying on the hills near the big homes of wealthy townspeople, fantasying that she is the mistress of a rich man.

Events move swiftly now. Melody has an accident at the mill which severely damages his guitar-playing hand. Then Mat is arrested in Pittsburgh for attempting to kill a man. Melody drives to Pittsburgh to bail him out, and on the return trip Mat, crushed and defeated, tells him that Anna no longer truly gives herself to him.

The portents of disaster build. Again steel serves as the underlying metaphor to suggest the hellish antilife man has created, and it is again the raving Smothers who calls up the image of a monster that demands human sacrifice. Smothers senses impending death. "Ever'body better be on the lookout. Steel liable to git somebody today. I got a deep feelin' in my bones," he says. The men laugh and Bo, the foreman, promises Smothers, "If it's you … we make you up into watch fobs. The boys round the bunkhouse'll wear you across their vests for luck." Smothers tells the hair-raising story of how he lost his legs in the mill and how afterward, "All the time in the hospital I kin hear that steel talkin' … I kin hear that steel laughin' an' talkin' till it fit to bust my head clean open … I kin hear when cold steel whisper all the time and hot roll steel scream like hell. It's a sin to melt up the ground…."

Melody, too, has come to sense steel as a death god. "Suddenly Melody was aware of the warning. He started up. There was great danger. Something screamed it inside him…. Perhaps the monster had gotten tired of an occasional victim. Perhaps he was about to break his chains. He would destroy masses of men, flesh, bones and blood, leaving only names to bury."

And then there is a blinding flash, followed by "a mushroom cloud, streaked with whirling red fire…." Several workers, Smothers included, are killed. Chinatown is blinded.

In a sense each of the brothers has now been rendered impotent: Chinatown, who lives by outward symbols, can no longer see; Melody, who lives through his music, can no longer play the guitar; and Mat has become a hulking shell of a man because Anna no longer loves him. All three brothers go to live with Anna. She no longer sleeps with Mat, but takes care of Chinatown, whose eyes are like "old eggs rotting in their ragged half shells, purple and revolting."

Racial tensions are rising in the town. The union is moving toward a strike and the steel interests are countering by bringing more Negroes in from the South. Negro leaders have been bought off and are directing Negro workers not to join the union. Meanwhile the depleted Mat has taken to walking alone among the hills on the edge of town. On one occasion he is approached by the law and sworn in as a deputy, ostensibly to maintain order but really to help break the forthcoming strike. He views this as an opportunity to redeem his faltering manhood with Anna—and at the same time, unconsciously, to wreak his vengeance on whites.

On the day of the strike, Melody, in order to bolster Chinatown's dashed ego, takes him to a brothel. Inadvertently he discovers Anna has been secretly working there nights, and rushes back to the shack to accuse her—and to beg her to run away with him. Suddenly Mat returns. Overhearing their conversation, he savagely beats Anna into a heap, then shambles back to town and brutally provokes some of the strikers on orders of the sheriff. In the ensuing melee, Mat kills and injures a number of them before he is himself hacked down.

The novel closes on Melody and Chinatown headed for Pittsburgh, where they will begin life anew.

Part of the strength of this final section of the novel lies in Attaway's generally successful fusion of naturalistic and metaphysical elements. The social and economic forces that drive the brothers from the Kentucky hills and divide the steel community in bloody conflict are in themselves crimes against nature. The same pride and greed that destroy the soil manifest themselves again as racial tension and industrial strife. Attaway focuses these perceptions on Mat just prior to his death. Having been rejected by Anna, Mat tries to redeem his ego by identifying himself with steel.

Big Mat looked at the mills, and the big feelings were lifting him high in the air. He was big as God Almighty…. He could have spit and quenched a blast furnace…. Smothers had been a liar. Steel couldn't curse a man. Steel couldn't hurt him. He was the riding boss. How could those dead mills touch him? With his strength he could relight their fires or he could let them lie cold.

But like some epic Greek hero, Mat recognizes his hubris at the moment of his death, and intuits that his brutality in attacking the workers is just like the brutality to which he himself had been subjected in the South. And he recognizes too that the young Slav who is striking at him with a pickaxe handle is not unlike the Mat who struck out violently at a white man in Kentucky. Like Oedipus, Mat is his own persecutor and victim.

Unfortunately, for Mat (and the Negro by implication) vision comes too late. Attaway contrasts Mat's vision at death to Chinatown's continuing blindness in life. On the train that carries Melody and Chinatown to Pittsburgh, the brothers meet a blind Negro soldier who used to be a steel worker. When Chinatown asks why he left the mills, the soldier explains that he responded to a deep feeling inside him—a sound of guns. He tells Chinatown that he too can hear the guns if he listens carefully. Chinatown strains, and "their noise came over the rumble of the train."

"Sound like somethin' big an' important that a fella's missin', don't it?" asked the soldier.

Chinatown nodded.

Melody watched the nod. He looked at the two blind men closely. Their heads cocked to one side, listening for sounds that didn't exist. They were twins.

And so the blind lead the blind. Just as the soldier was lured away from home by the nonexistent glory of war, so Melody and his brothers have been seduced from their homes by promises of freedom and security in the North. And thus it would always be for men like Chinatown and the soldier.

One of the most significant passages in the novel describes a strange ritual some of the workers perform after Smothers' death. It will be recalled that prior to the explosion in the mill, Bo says that if Smothers were to die, the men would use his remains for watch fobs. The men carry out their promise one day in the bunkhouse.

[Bo] sat on the floor in the middle of an intent audience. No one spoke. Their attention was for Bo and for what he did. Between his legs was a pile of little steel scraps. In front of him burned a tin of canned heat. Bo put a steel dish on the heat. Into the dish went a few pieces of lead. Then he sat back to wait.

..…

For twenty minutes they sat. Nothing sounded but the sudden scrape of a boot against the grain of the floor. Then the massed breathing of the men began to grow until it whistled. A watch in someone's pocket ticked louder and louder. The creak of the bunkhouse in the changing air came now and again. Each man heard his own heart circling its own blood. So what was silence spoke louder and louder.

Then the time was up. The lead cupped the bottom of the dish, a heavy dust scumming its brightness. With ceremony Bo broke that scum. Then out of his pocket came the little chains. A drop of lead fastened each chain to one of the steel scraps. Shortly he was through. Bo began to pass out these newly crested watch fobs. Afterward the group broke up.

Attaway ends his novel on a note of defeat. Yet even in defeat, his protagonists persist—though not very hopefully—in their struggle for survival and identity. The brothers' renewed search for the good life seems doomed from the start. One knows that the entire cycle of hope, passion, and defeat will begin again with such persons as the blind "twins," Chinatown and the soldier—blind because they will continue to be deluded by unattainable dreams and promises.

One wonders, naturally, whether their author was himself as overcome with the hopelessness of his prognosis. Born in Mississippi in 1912, the son of a physician, Attaway was himself part of the great migration North. He attended public schools in Chicago and, after an interim as a hobo, he worked at a variety of jobs before returning to the University of Illinois to complete his education. It was in high school, Attaway writes, that he developed an interest in becoming an author. He had always assumed that Negro success was to be won in genteel professions like medicine, but upon first reading Langston Hughes, his outlook was transformed. Prior to the appearance of his two novels, he published little. His first novel, as we have seen, was promising; his second, a classic of its kind. Why then did Attaway stop writing fiction? He was only twenty-nine when Blood on the Forge appeared. It is, of course, always hazardous to guess at the motives of a writer, but possibly some clues may be found in the works themselves.

It is first of all clear that Attaway had no intention of writing "race" fiction. He did not want his novels to stop short at "protest," but rather hoped to make some grand metaphysical statement about the conditions of life and human experience, in which, possibly, Negro characters figured. But such a wholly laudable ambition was not, as has already been suggested, something the American reading public was prepared to accept from a Negro author—especially at the outset of World War II, when the great tasks ahead appeared to lie more in action and less in reflection. Attaway may simply have been discouraged at the response to his book—and quit.

Another alternative, however, suggests itself. It is perhaps in the realm of ideas that we may look for the source of Attaway's arrested artistic development. Basically Attaway is a romantic. Let Me Breathe Thunder, for all its praise of stable family life and the virtues of farming, ultimately celebrates the free-wheeling bohemianism of hoboes—and Attaway, by manipulating his plot this way and that, manages to free his protagonists from any social and moral obligations. In another romantic vein, Blood on the Forge projects the myth of the "good" soil corrupted by man's greed, whose logical absurdity manifests itself in the manufacture of steel. While no one would deny that the excesses of American capitalism have produced cruel and dehumanizing injustices, it is hard, after Darwin, to ascribe moral virtues to nature. And since it is scarcely possible any longer to look to nature as something apart and holy, Attaway may well have written himself out of subject matter.

And yet if one grants Attaway his premises, it is undeniable that he has written a beautiful and moving novel. Nor can one deny that his vision of earth as sanctified remains persistently embedded in the American mythos. It is, after all, out of such nostalgia that art is created.