So much emphasis has been placed recently on nominating the important new Black novelists that attending to the older ones has been neglected. Large critical claims have been made lately for Ishmael Reed, William Melvin Kelley, and John A. Williams, while the work of William Attaway and Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, remains buried under the weight of years of critical indifference. I want to make a plea for William Attaway as a novelist, one who, like so many Afro-American writers of fiction, wrote one or two books, and then, as in the case of Toomer, apparently was discouraged from fulfilling early promise. Attaway published his first book, Let Me Breathe Thunder, in 1939, his second, Blood on the Forge, two years later. The two are almost completely unknown by Black and white readers; both audiences should give themselves the chance to become seriously concerned with Attaway's vision.

In neither book does he embrace a prescriptive racial esthetic: many of the major characters in Let Me Breathe Thunder are white, in Blood on the Forge Black. He writes about people who engage his sympathy and imagination; sometimes they are Afro-American, sometimes white Americans. Since the implied audience for both books is "the common reader," Attaway is not confined to writing "only" about Blacks or "only" about whites. Neither color is a limitation on his writing: they are given material. The false dichotomy between "race" novels and novels of "universal significance" is fortunately not a problem for him.

The central characters in Let Me Breathe Thunder are estranged from bourgeois American society because although racially acceptable, they are hoboes, and therefore outsiders in social, if not racial status. As proletarians, both their stake and their place in America are problematic. They have no permanent home, employment, or social relations. Movement is the permanent ontological fact of their existence. The narrator, Ed, has perhaps a more common-sensical hold on experience than his fellow hobo, Step (using names descriptively is sustained in the later novel), but the lack of any lasting orientation in both their lives is equal. They befriend a nine-year-old Mexican youth who is even less at home in the universe than they are: Hi Boy is without parents (Step "adopts" him as Sampson becomes the temporary "father" of the two transients), without friends except Step and Ed, and without a language to articulate his plight—he has the slipperiest of grasps on English. An emblem of almost total exclusion, he dies of an infection caused by a wound in his hand he inflicted with a fork in order to prove to Step he was not a coward. The world he greeted with his name allowed him the briefest existence only. The themes of separation and dislocation inform Blood on the Forge in a different way because the Moss brothers are racial as well as social outcasts.

Attaway dramatically imagines Ed as having had more advantages than Step. Ed has had a high school education, some home life, some sense of belonging. His sidekick, however, never had a real home; he was sent to the mills instead of having candles on his birthday cake, yet he pathetically carries a set of keys that fit locks on a nonexistent home. Anna, the girl Step violates in a tawdry affair of sexual initiation, has no mother and her four brothers died of an illness during the war. Possessed of a home and a father, she demands more; her vision of the open road she assumes Step and Ed travel ends in a whorehouse operated by Mag, a middle-aged Black ex-prostitute living with Cooper, her man. To sustain his public image as a lady's man, Cooper makes Mag jealous of Anna, whom she accidentally wounds with her rifle while trying to hit Cooper. Appropriately, he flees as a hobo on the same train car Ed, Step, and Hi Boy are running away on. Just as in Blood on the Forge, indifferent machines transport the protagonists across America, as if they were merely freight:

"That's what trains was made for … passengers," he (Step) said.

"And freight," I added.

"We ain't neither," he said. "Don't that strike you funny?"

"Nothing strikes me funny now," I said, trying to shrink my back away from my soaked jacket.

"We ain't even people. We ain't nothing.

They refuse to accept their existence, insisting that they are looking for "a job of work," rather than being hoboes. Like the Indian in the myth Sampson relates to them, they are completely out of place, and if they move, they will cause a disturbance. Consequently they "breathe thunder": "'he (the legendary Indian) was a wanderer by nature. Being outside of patterns, he had to be a wanderer.'" His tormented spirit "'still moans and moans, and in its misery sometimes breathes thunder.'" Attaway's figures recall the Wandering Jew, the mythical Indian, and all the Eternal Wanderers of legend in that all are unaccommodated: their fate is never to find a permanent home in the universe; they are not fully welcome anywhere. Imprisoned in such a world, they demand a locus of moral responsibility, but there is none, as Step knows:

"Why'd he stick the fork in his hand in the first place? Whose fault was it that we couldn't leave him in Yakima and was scared to get a doc when there was a chance? Whose fault is everything?"

There is no resonance between reality and Step's question because of the nonsensicality of the world and man's total negligibility.

The only echo Step and Ed hear as they listen to existence is Hi Boy, the phrase the Mexican boy keeps repeating and the phrase they use to call him by. He represents the commitment and obligation to another human being, a responsibility they are unaccustomed to. When the mountains of Hi Boy's native Mexico are mentioned, the narrator says,

The kid gazed away in the distance. His eyes were soft and mystical looking. He was far away at some place that must have been so simple and beautiful that only a child's mind could bear to go there. His eyes rose with a mountain whose peak was lost in white and mist.

Hi Boy is the innocence, the Edenic state that Ed and especially Step were denied; he is "a pocket-size edition of a priest laughing over his beads, saying his saints on his fingers."

Like the Lost Generation writers before him, Attaway suggests that after all the dross has been melted away from society, only basic values, however temporary, remain. As Toomer and Hemingway find a kind of secular redemption in the earth in Cane and The Sun Also Rises, so Attaway implies that Sampson's orchard on Four Mile Farm is as close as his characters will come to a home, a place of orientation. Attaway's symbolic use of geography approaches the pastoral ideal, a Hesperides where Anna is a nymph guarding the golden fruit. Herrick might not be able to hammer out his golden verses in this Arcadia, but it is the only place Step and Ed find at least an evanescent accommodation with the conditions of their existence.

In King Lear after Edgar enters disguised as Poor Tom, the mad man, the King says, "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Attaway adds resonance and amplitude to his second novel by exploring Lear's image of natural man in a more elaborate intense manner than he did in Let Me Breathe Thunder. The three protagonists in Blood on the Forge, the Moss brothers, not only lack a home (they are part of the Great Migration to the industrial North), but also they are alien to the racial majority. Their train ride north is more devastating than Ed and Step's train rides, because it recapitulates the original slave passage of their ancestors when they were deracinated. With Ed and Step the three Mosses share also a love for the earth which they farmed. Blood on the Forge also terminates with a pointless train ride.

The first part of this five-part novel demonstrates that in leaving the South the Mosses were not losing paradise. In leaving "the red clay-hills of Kentucky," they are abandoning an overworked earth that has become sterile, like Hattie, Big Mat's wife, who has lost six children. They are virtually slaves in the crop-lein system that exploits them. Still, in the South Melody plays the hungry blues on a guitar, while in the North he stops playing when he intentionally smashes his picking hand; in the South, Chinatown, who lives through outward symbols, has stature because of his shiny gold tooth, while in the North he becomes blind and can no longer know if his tooth impresses others or not; in the South Mat's family integrity is maintained—he and his half-brothers live together with Hattie—while in the North Mat forgets about Hattie for Anna and he and his brothers draw apart.

Adumbrations of the family's imminent disintegration percolate through the surface of the narrative of Part One. The bloody violence Melody will witness is foreshadowed: after Mat mutilated the mule that killed the brothers' maw, "Melody had fallen on the ground and vomited and for three days afterward he couldn't hold food on his stomach. The sight of blood always acted on him like that." Mat's attack on the riding boss preludes his assault on the union members in the steel mills. But the most powerful foreshadowing is also a resonant prospective irony: when Chinatown contemplates the jackleg's proposal of going north he says "'man have to kill himself workin' to make the kind of money he was talkin' about.'" Mat of course is killed and China may as well be dead when he loses his sight.

Part Two is only a few pages in length, but it forestalls the ultimate separation of the Moss brothers and it also contains metaphors that imply the identities of each of the three brothers is problematic. On their journey north in a boxcar, the Blacks are "bunched up like hogs headed for market." They "forgot even that they had eyes in their heads," and when the train stopped for a while, "they were blinded by the light of a cloudy day." Filled with sight imagery, the entire novel is a study in optics: none of the three major characters can see clearly. They are either literally blind like Chinatown and the blind preacher from Kentucky, or their moral vision is clouded. Crammed into the train car, "Big Mat could not defend his identity against the pack." Melody, China, and Mat repeat the pattern of their West African ancestors three hundred years earlier: they are the chattel of the white capitalists. China's sense of individuality is so gravely threatened by the passage that he insists Melody feel his gold tooth, China's emblem of selfhood.

The third section introduces the three into the world of the steel mills, where machines rule men. They wonder "what men in their right minds would leave off tending green growing things to tend iron monsters?" (Attaway's emphasis). Cut off from their beloved earth, the men realize they have not gained the Promised Land but its very opposite. And in fact, the inside of a steel mill is hot and fiery like Hell itself. Melody tells China the Day of Judgement will be the coming of a steel mill. Attaway implies that if being transported as slaves from West Africa was the first step in the destruction of Black men, the second step was the Great Migration after World War I. Just after the train's arrival in Pennsylvania, China and Melody cannot find their way back to the bunkhouse when it starts to rain so they are not able to see; this geographical and optical disorientation reflects their metaphysical plight. The whore the two brothers watch has a rotten breast which will be recalled later by China's blind eyes, "old eggs rotting in their ragged half shells, purple and revolting." All three brothers later encounter another figure, the seer Smothers, who prophesies that steel is a monster which will cram them into its maw. They do not attend his warning; he himself is later converted into watch fobs for the workmen to wear, after he is killed by the same monster he warned against. Attaway's second Anna is introduced in Part Three: she is a Mexican whore who is also far from home and unhappy in her new environment. She will be the wedge that drives Mat and Melody apart.

The last two parts chronicle the final destruction of the Mosses: China is blinded, Mat loses Anna and is killed, and Melody smashes his hand so that he can never play the guitar again (the end of Black folk art). Their downfall is paralleled by the fall of the East European steelworkers, who, although many have families and children, nevertheless see their daughters being raped by their own brothers and also becoming whores for their father's own fellow workers. Attaway believes no one has any cosmic status because of mankind's utter negligibility and the universe's absolute nonsensicality. Suffering does not bring understanding or grandeur: when China loses his vision, the paradox of the blind seer does not obtain—his blindness simply literalizes the metaphor. If what matters is man's relationship to himself, to other men, to Nature, and to God, then all four relationships have been abrogated in Attaway's vision of experience. Blood on the Forge suggests there are no relationships: man is completely unaccommodated by the facts of existence. To compensate, the Moss brothers retreat to the past. Big Mat and Melody walk in the hills around the giant industrial complex below, while Chinatown and Melody play the wishing game: they wish they were back on the land, where there is growth instead of death only. Mat's last effort to gain some sense of selfhood, however provisional, is as a deputy sheriff for the mill owners. He becomes in effect the riding boss he had earlier beaten; now a young Slave becomes the earlier Mat and beats Mat to death during a riot between the union members and the sheriff's men. Mat has been exploited by whites once again. Rather than winning Anna back as a strikebreaker, he loses his life. At the end, Melody and Chinatown board a train going to Pittsburgh; across from China sits a sightless Black veteran of World War I: "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." An image that Pinter or Beckett might employ, it reveals Attaway's uncompromisingly hopeless view of a permanently disoriented, unregenerate creature.