[Young is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines Blood on the Forge as an example of proletarian fiction.]

In his eloquent novel, Blood on the Forge (1941), William Attaway delved into the history of the black man in America. But, like Richard Wright in his folk history of the migration, instead of dramatizing the exploits of a historic race hero, Attaway looked with the scrutiny of a sociologist at the brutal experience of the mass of blacks who migrated from the agrarian South into the industrial North at the time of the First World War. Like [Arna Bontemps'] Black Thunder, Attaway's novel should be classed as proletarian fiction. In fact, the general structure of the novel conformed more closely to the typical proletarian novel than did Bontemps' because the setting was more contemporary and the exploitation of the workers was placed in an industrial environment. But Attaway's book was not the run-of-the-mill, artless formula-novel which was characteristic of so much proletarian fiction. For in addition to portraying the persecution and exploitation of the workers, black and white, Attaway also intelligently dramatized the erosion of the old southern folkways by the immense and impersonal force of the machine.

Blood on the Forge was Attaway's second novel. In 1939, he had published Let Me Breathe Thunder, a picaresque novel about two depression-era hoboes. Perhaps the most interesting note about this novel is that its principal characters are white. Though in many ways Attaway's first novel is very effective, it relies too heavily on melodrama; his protagonists are just a bit too naïve and sentimental to be believable. Such is not the case with Blood on the Forge which ranks as one of the finest novels of the depression era.

Attaway's main characters are three brothers. Chinatown is lazy, hedonistic, and lives by outer symbols—his proudest possession is his golden tooth about which he explains "can't 'ford to lose this tooth." Melody is introspective, intelligent, and sensitive—the music he makes on his guitar is expressive of his personality. And, finally, Big Mat, the oldest brother, is a physical giant who, in hopes of some day receiving a call to preach, reads his Bible every day. Wrote Attaway, "To almost everybody but his close kin he was a stupid, unfeeling giant, a good man to butcher hogs…. Melody alone knew him completely. Melody, from his dream world, could read the wounds in Big Mat's eyes." The essential characteristic of each of the three men will be destroyed by the new machine environment.

All three brothers are tenant farmers in the green hills of Kentucky. They are forced to flee from those hills when Big Mat, pouring out the bitterness of years of humiliation and persecution, thrashes the white riding boss: "The riding boss fell to the ground, blood streaming from his smashed face. He struggled to get to his feet. A heavy foot caught him in the side of the neck. His head hung over his shoulder at an odd angle," Aside from the immediate necessity of escaping white retaliation, their flight has another level of meaning for Attaway. They are leaving the land because it has become infertile. It is worn out, incapable of sustaining the black folk any longer. "The land has jest give up, and I guess it's good for things to come out like this," observes Big Mat as they prepare to leave.

They meet an agent from a northern steel mill who gives them passage to the mill on board a freight car. The blackness of the boxcar is symbolic of a womb out of which they will be reborn into the industrial environment. But it is also a coffin, symbolic of the impending death of the folk consciousness: "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 drooping 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."

When the new men arrive at the mills, Attaway contrasts them to the men who have already been conditioned to the sterile monotony of the industrial existence: "Everything was too strange for the green men to comprehend. In a daze, they were herded to the mill gates and checked in. The night shift was getting off. They mingled for a few minutes at the mill gates. All of them were gray in the dirty river mist." The idea that the green men will become gray men is skillfully developed by Attaway. He never deviates from the attitude that as bad as the feudalistic southern environment was, it was still alive; it was still characterized by very personal relationships between human beings, not the impersonal, mechanized quality of the northern environment. Social scientists like E. Franklin Frazier, looking toward long-range goals, had optimistically observed the destruction of the old folk culture as a positive development accelerating integration into the mainstream of American society. Attaway had carefully dramatized this process, but without the optimism of the sociologists. His artistic consciousness was much more sensitive to immediate suffering, and it told him that possibly something valuable was being destroyed.

It does not take long for the three brothers to become gray men, stripped of their folk identities by the mills. Melody finds that "the old music was going," and after an accident to his hand in the mills he ceases to play his guitar altogether. Chinatown is blinded by an explosion in the mills and he is no longer capable of seeing those outward symbols through which he had lived: "Now those symbols were gone, and he was lost." Big Mat, because of his enormous strength, fares best in the competition with the monster machines. But even he succumbs eventually, losing his religion and becoming shamefully impotent—a mere hulk of the virile man he once was.

The last sections of the novel revolve around Mat and his efforts to regain his manhood. There is rising dissatisfaction among the workers at the mills and they decide to strike. Big Mat has no intention of joining the union. And through his attitude the author attempts to explain why black men were successfully employed as strike-breakers for so many years. "Big Mat was not thinking about the labor trouble. Yet he knew that he would not join the union. For a man who had so lately worked from dawn to dark in the fields twelve hours and the long shift were not killing. For a man who had ended each year in debt any wage at all was a wonderful thing. For a man who had known no personal liberties even the iron hand of the mills was an advancement. In his own way he thought these things. As yet he could not see beyond them." Mat is signed up as a company deputy and he regains his manhood through violence. "He had handled people, and they feared him. Their fear had made him whole." But this feeling of manhood is only temporary, it has no strength against feelings or ideas such as those behind the expression "nigger." He can maintain his manhood only through repeated violence.

Attaway reintroduces the proletarian theme within the context of Mat's anti-union violence. He understands Mat's position, but clearly disagrees with it. Mat achieves proletarian consciousness only as he is being beaten to death by one of the union men. He suddenly suspects that he has taken over the role of the riding boss. "Maybe somewhere in these mills a new Mr. Johnson was creating riding bosses," realizes Mat, "making a difference where none existed." Big Mat's sudden, intuitive realization rings perhaps the one false note in Attaway's novel. The attempt to submerge race conflict within the context of class conflict was no more convincing when portrayed dramatically than when it was proclaimed by radical politicians and scholars.