SOURCE: "Playing the Wishing Game: Folkloric Elements in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge," in CLA Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, September, 1988, pp. 10-22.

One element of black folk culture that plays an important part in William Attaway's novel Blood on the Forge (1941) is the wishing game. Early in Part I, Melody, one of three Moss brothers subsisting on a poor Kentucky farm in 1919, begins the game. His motive is distraction from hunger while awaiting Big Mat, the brother who sharecrops the farm and who may bring some food. In the call-and-response fashion characteristic of Afro-American culture, Melody involves his brother Chinatown in the game: "'China,' he half sang, 'you know where I wish I was at now?'" Chinatown needs no prodding because the brothers have often played this game, their wishes usually formed by the "grand places pictured in the old newspapers" lining the walls of their shack. Led on by the responses of Chinatown, Melody spins his narrative. He imagines himself in town on a Saturday noon, all dressed up in a "white-checkered vest and a ice-cream suit," with a gold watch chain and "yeller shoes with dimes in the toes. Man, man!"

A small detail in this apparently insignificant game reveals an important difference between Melody and the other Moss brothers. In helping along the story, Chinatown tries to add girls, but Melody says that the girls can wait until evening. Noon is the time instead for playing pool. When Chinatown objects that Melody in actuality cannot play pool, Melody replies, "But I wish I can." Unlike the other major characters in the novel, Melody can maintain the distinction between unrealizeable desires and reality. With one exception, which he quickly recognizes, Melody keeps wishing within the confines of play, part of a necessary game that the mind must perform when a person is denied opportunities and privileges by society. For others in the novel, however, the wish becomes the delusion, to be paid for with pain and even death.

These events lie in the future, however. The first instance of the wishing game celebrates the rich poetry of the black oral tradition and the gifted folk artists within it. As the brothers continue the story, Chinatown regrets that Melody has brought his guitar to town but will not play it. Melody answers:

"It don't make no never mind, 'cause my box is shinin' with silver, and the stops all covered with mother-of-pearl. An' everybody see me say that must be Mr Melody. They say howdy to Mr Dressin'-man Melody."

The values of the wishing game are clear. The suppressed desires of a deprived minority can find expression and a measure of vicarious gratification. Unusually gifted individuals acquire a medium for expression and acclaim. Painful present reality can be temporarily forgotten, and frustrations can find a safe outlet. The limitations of this game are included in this early scene also when Hattie, Big Mat's wife, interrupts to say, "Wish night gone and real night come on." The brothers are quickly brought back to the reality of no food in the house and only used tobacco to chew.

Melody's oral virtuosity has not ended, however, as Hattie's play on the word "night" runs through his mind. Her statement, he says, sounds like a line from the blues, another of the great black oral achievements. As Melody develops the figure of the night personified, a fundamental element of the wishing games will become evident, the desire to escape a white-dominated world. This theme, the core of most desires voiced by the nonwhite characters in Blood on the Forge, explains the large role the author gives to this particular game. Melody imagines night as an old black woman, sweeping her black skirts to obliterate the things of the earth:

"At night the hills ain't red no more. There ain't no crab-apple trees squat in the hills, no more land to hoe in the red-hot sun—white the same as black…. Where the mule gone at? He only a voice in the pasture land…."

Melody's ability to pull back from fancy to reality appears at this point, too. When suddenly "he became conscious of what he was doing," he turned the game into a lighter vein with a strong undercurrent of reality:

"… Night-flyers is glow buckles on the garters of old creepin' night. The mosquitoes is her swamp-fever sting…. But it don't last long, 'cause she say, 'Git along, an' be nothin', 'cause black ain't nothin', an' I is black….'"

Throughout the novel, Attaway shows the crucial yet ambiguous role of wishing in black life by juxtaposing playful and serious manifestations. At times, the reader cannot determine which of the two forms is being expressed by a character, and one senses that the characters themselves are sometimes equivocal. When Big Mat returns with the makings for chitterlings, the family happily awaits their preparation. The white landowner who has given Mat the food surprisingly has promised the use of a mule, too. Immediately, Hattie and Melody begin imagining what the increased productivity will buy—fresh tobacco and pork on Sunday. When Chinatown voices suspicion, Hattie, reluctant to forgo her dream, advises not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Chinatown replies, "'I'm pass the mouth now. I'm lookin' right down his throat.'" Such caution regarding the white world proves true when Big Mat recalls that as the landowner made the loan he warned of "jacklegs" coming into the area recruiting blacks to go North and work. The refusal to let dreams lead one permanently away from the reality of living in a white world seems instinctive as long as these people live in Kentucky. When the brothers are forced to take the jackleg's offer and go to work in the Pennsylvania steel mills, though, only Melody successfully resists the lure of destructive wishes.

By making wishing a key element in Blood on the Forge, Attaway conveys a major theme of the novel. The fuller life seemingly promised for blacks by life in the North proves to be an illusion. When the hopes contained while living in the South are given expression in the North, even greater pain and disillusionment result. For Attaway, the lesson of the Great Migration to the promised land is ironic indeed.

Even before leaving Kentucky, the difference between Melody and Big Mat in handling disappointment is evident. Whenever the deprivations of his life threaten to overwhelm Melody, he finds release in song and game. An exceptional creativity enables him to project his desires at length in verse, feel satisfied, and return to reality better able to cope. Big Mat, however, has no such release. Melody, who knows Mat best, sees the emotional pressure behind the strong, stoic demeanor. For both men, the chief obstacle is being black in a world controlled by whites.

One spring morning, the two brothers pause before plowing to enjoy the smell of the only good parcel of land they farm. Feeling the "earth like a good thing in his heart," Melody tells Big Mat that such pleasure will "[m]ake you forgit you just a nigger, workin' the white man's ground." In a skillfully written passage, thoughts of what might be lead the brothers in separate ways. Melody speaks of the great lack in his life, never having the chance to attend school year round "like white kids." This man, gifted with words, knows how much an education would have benefited his expression. At the same time, Big Mat pursues his own line of thought. Disappointed by his wife Hattie's miscarrying six times, Mat bitterly compares her to the reliable earth. Finally, Melody's articulation of his furthest fantasy, "Guess I oughta been white," is surpassed by a deeper agony when Mat says, "Jest as well I was born a nigger. Got more misery than a white man could stand."

Chinatown, the third Moss brother, lacks the sensitivity of Melody and the potential explosiveness of Mat. Instead, he indulges in a different kind of play—chasing women, eating, and drinking his favorite "red pop." Representing Chinatown's dedication to fun is his front gold tooth, a visual symbol of his desire to please others on sight. For all his love of good times, Chinatown surprisingly is the most vulnerable of the brothers to extreme stress. Jammed into a boxcar with other blacks going north to Allegheny County, all of the Moss brothers are miserable, but Chinatown nearly loses control. Significantly, Melody's reassurance rescues Chinatown from panic. As they talk in the boxcar, Melody learns that Chinatown's easygoing nature masks a deeper insecurity based on race. Convinced by white mistreatment that he is nothing, Chinatown decides that he has to have something to make him feel like a person: "So all the time I dream 'bout a gold tooth, shinin' an' makin' everybody look when Chinatown smile." To achieve his goal, a healthy tooth was removed to make room for the gold.

The inhuman, terrifying crowding of the blacks in the train boxcar reawakens Chinatown's insecurity. He becomes convinced that the car's rattling has loosened the gold tooth, and if he sleeps, it will fall and be stolen. Eventually calmed by Melody, Chinatown repeats, "I jest got to have that tooth. Without it I ain't nobody." When the boxcar is finally opened, all the men temporarily experience what will become a permanent state for Chinatown at the end of the novel—blindness and the hearing of sounds that no longer exist. Identifying this condition with Chinatown implies that the greatest illusion a black person can suffer is one best typified by him, staking one's identity on visible tokens of self-esteem. Of all the characters surviving at the end, Chinatown is the most lost because his dream was the most superficial.

Another major character in Blood on the Forge who succumbs to the wishing game is Anna, one of the whores in the steel mill village. Originally from Mexico, Anna, a girl of fifteen, has come from New Mexico at the bidding of her aunt, Sugar Mama. When Melody first meets Anna, he learns of her dream of meeting a man who will get for her all the grand things she associates with white life in the United States. The man she describes has some of the qualities of certain heroes in folklore:

"He will be a big man with muscles like a bear on the mountain. That is so he can kill Sugar Mama if she try to hold me when I go with him. He will have a pine tree on his belly, hard like rock all the night. He will get me high-heel shoes with bright stones in the heels."

Such characters, larger than life in attributes and deeds, partake of the element of imaginative fulfillment of extreme human fancies in a manner similar to that of the wishing game. Some figures in black folk culture who reflect some of these qualities include John Henry, High John de Conquer in some of his manifestations, and Shine.

The man who answers Anna's wish is Big Mat. Impressed by his rescue of her at a dogfight, Anna wins him with a single kiss. In this initial encounter, their communication is primitive, speaking of a time thousands of years ago "when men said things in the talk of the wild beast." Events will prove, however, that the modern world requires more than this kind of blood knowledge. Anna and Big Mat will suffer in pursuing their dreams because they lack the thought and detachment that only Melody possesses. Later in the novel, when Mat sees himself as just such a giant character as Anna desired, he is at the height of his delusion.

Later, Anna discusses with Melody the origin of her dream. As a young girl, she became determined to rise above the impoverished lot of the Mexican peon. The chief stimulus was touring "Americanos," whose greater wealth inspired Anna to be just as grand:

"All the time I dream of high-heel shoes with bright stones in the heels that will make me like the Americanos, and nobody will take my picture along with the goats."

When Anna moves in with Big Mat, she spends the money he had been saving to bring his wife North in an attempt to realize the good life of white Americans. The result is pathetic:

Anna went into the stores and came out with rhinestone shoes and dresses like the hostesses wear in the dance halls. The rhinestones did not glitter after one trip down the slushy road. The dresses were heavy around the bottoms where they dragged in the mud. Still, Anna wore her new clothes every day and paraded through the Mexican part of town like an overseer's wife.

Anna's infatuation with rich American life leads eventually to violence. When she comes home late one night with clothes wet from lying on the ground and with twigs in her hair, Big Mat, thinking she has been with another man, beats her savagely. The truth is again pathetic. Identifying the good life with the people who live on the hills above the steel mills, Anna has spent the night on a furtive trip into those hills. Creeping close to one of the "white hill houses," Anna had spent the day and night hiding in the bushes until slinking back home dispirited in body and soul.

Life in the North becomes increasingly demoralizing for the Moss brothers. Conflict between union supporters and the steel company leaves the brothers in the middle. Big Mat's relationship with Anna grows more strained and frustrating. Further catastrophe strikes when a blast furnace explodes, killing fourteen workers and blinding Chinatown. The brother who put such stock in his visual appearance now has eyes that look like "old eggs rotting in their ragged half shells, purple and revolting."

In the crucial first days after this accident, Melody shows his superior ability to cope with reality by his treatment of Chinatown. Again the wishing game is involved. Still in shock, Chinatown reverts to the past, avoiding confronting the reality of his mutilated condition. Melody plays along, assuring Chinatown in his greatest need that the gold tooth is intact. This gambit threatens to undo Chinatown's precarious balance when he asks to see his tooth in a mirror. For diversion, Melody begins the wishing game by asking Chinatown, "You know where I wish I was at now?" Chinatown quickly joins in.

The time in the game is the same as before when Melody sang in Kentucky to appease hunger—noontime. Instead of staying in one place, however, Melody is on the move. Like a larger-than-life folk hero, Melody must hurry because he plans "to cover the earth 'fore midnight." Perhaps reflecting his increased fears, Chinatown asks about stepping on snakes. With amazing ingenuity, Melody sings in succession of a number of snakes, each embellished with highly fanciful details. The rich black oral tradition, with its capacity for inventing endless variations on a subject, enables Melody to create a form to divert and delight Chinatown.

The first snake Melody meets, a coachwhip, lashes at him, but Melody stomps it into the ground. Up it springs, as a "tall whitewood tree," lashing the air "a little at the tip as the leaves 'gin to fall." Next Melody outwits a hoop snake, pushing its head into the ground. All that is left is "a crooked wild chinaberry tree, curved in the wind and broken like a old wagon tree." Thus Melody's inventiveness runs, dispatching snake after snake. As quickly as Chinatown calls out names of new snakes, Melody can transform them into harmless objects, exorcising his brother's fears at one remove.

To illustrate Melody's spontaneous creativity, a rattle-snake becomes a "tree full of jack-o'-lanterns now, rattling when the wind blow"; a blue racer a bow tie; a barn snake "a string of red and yellow beads for the neck o' a gal"; and a root snake "a walkin' stick, like a branch o' juniper." The last snake, a spreading adder, is completely confounded in Melody's fantasy:

"When I come up on him he unjoint himself. Ain't nothin' but a lot of little pieces underfoot. All I got to do is mix him around with one toe. When he come back together there his tail at the wrong end, his head in the middle."

In the climax of this version of the wishing game (which also takes the form of the boast, a venerable tradition in black folk culture), three themes already discussed come together: wish fulfillment, assumption of fabled attributes, and longing for escape from white dominance:

"Come midnight … come midnight … well, I go look at all the farmers. They all black. There ain't no white man in the land. Nobody gits crop-aliened. There ain't no ridin' boss. The muck ground cover all the farmers so they grow potatoes under their armpits. They grow field corn between their toes. One man jest let a big tree grow on his back for shade. All he do is walk in the shade and drink corn whisky."

Fortunately, the exhaustion of Melody's fancy and the demand of Chinatown's thirst coincide. The limit of Melody's ability to ride the wishing game is evident when he goes to get Chinatown's favorite red pop. As Attaway writes, Melody "was glad to leave the wishing game unended, glad to leave the house for the red pop."

The realism of Melody is further underscored when we follow him in search of Chinatown's drink. After obtaining the pop, Melody stops at the bunkhouse and discovers Bo, a gang boss, involved in a strange operation. He is making chains fastened to scraps of steel to be used as watch fobs. The bits of steel represent the remains of the body of a worker named Smothers, melded amongst the debris scattered by the force of the furnace explosion. Interestingly, in light of Attaway's investigation into the complex nature of play in Blood on the Forge, Smothers had been crippled when trying to win a bet by walking the steel-rolling tables from one end of the mill to another. Close to winning his wager, Smothers' legs were crushed by a hurtling bar of hot steel. Now Melody joins the others in the bunkhouse in wearing "that little piece of Smothers across his vest for luck." Just as throughout Blood on the Forge game merges with seriousness, here realism flirts with superstition, and the singer undaunted by snakes readily secures a fetish.

As tension grows between the union and the company, the Moss brothers retreat further into their own small unit. Impressed by Mat's strength, the leader of a group of strike breakers working for the company offers Mat a chance to become a deputy earning four dollars a day: More than the extra pay Mat is lured by the words of another deputy:

"So long, pal. Just remember Monday that you're the boss in this here town. Anythin' you do is all right, 'cause you're the law."

Mat thinks back to another game, one played when he was a child in Kentucky by white sharecroppers' children who enjoyed taunting Mat with a racist chant:

      "Nigger, nigger never die.
      Black face and shiny eye,
      Kinky hair and pigeon toe—
      That the way the nigger go…."

Now Mat has an opportunity to turn the joke around since he has become the boss, the law: "Those thrilling words were too much to resist. He was a boss, a boss over whites."

Returning before a final assault on union headquarters, Mat in his newly won power expects respect from Anna. Instead, three sets of unrealistic dreams come together tragically. Anna is still possessed by her desire for a rich life, symbolized by the gaudy dress and rhinestone shoes she wears. Melody has become infatuated by Anna and arrives hoping to persuade her to run away with him. For once, even Melody has lost his objectivity. When Anna tells both brothers that to her they are contemptible peons, Mat again unleashes his fury against her. Unable to stop the belt whipping of Anna, Melody withdraws, like the others now, a "man in a dream." After the attack ends, his artist's eye fastens on a telling image: "two bright objects in the center of the room," the rhinestone shoes with high heels left behind by Anna. Gazing at the wreckage of several people's hopes, Melody returns to reality, aware more than ever of the delusive power of dreams.

Mat's aggression against the striking workers is fueled by Anna's reference to him as a peon. Although he may have been a kind of peon in the South, Mat thinks that in the North "here there was no riding boss," symbol for a life bound to the soil. While Mat beats the strikers in the union office, however, he gains a new insight:

He was exalted. A bitterness toward all things white hit him like hot iron. Then he knew. There was a riding boss—Big Mat.

For a time, this knowledge increases Mat's sense of power to the point of megalomania. The mythic superman of folklore returns in the person of Mat, recalling Melody's playful songs but changed by the real context of violence:

Big Mat looked at the mills, and the big feelings were lifting him high in the air. He was big as God Almighty. The sun was down, or his head would have thrown a shadow to shade the river front. He could have spit and quenched a blast furnace. Big Mat's eyes were big as half-moons.

At the height of his sense of power, like a classical instead of a folklore hero, Mat is fatally clubbed by a young Slav worker. Before dying, however, Mat achieves at last "all the objectivity of a man who is closer to death than life." In this last lucid moment, Mat realizes that he is like all of the riding bosses of both North and South, merely a tool of larger forces. Once, back in Kentucky, Mat had beaten a riding boss. Now someone similarly beats him, and the cycle continues. As Mat dies, he wonders:

Had that riding boss been as he was now? Big Mat went farther away and no longer could distinguish himself from these other figures. They were all one and the same.

Emphasizing that point, the worker clubbing Mat becomes as frenzied as had his victim whipping Anna and beating the workers. As the worker continues hitting an already dead Mat, the description points out the close, almost frightening line between certain forms of play and some of the grimmest aspects of reality:

The young Slav danced about and used the pickax handle. Because the big black man did not fall he was filled with terror. Because the little eyes seemed to regard him so calmly he had to become frenzied to finish the job. So he danced about, and the sound of the blows was dull. It was like a Punch and Judy show, the way the black head wagged under the stick. It was funny, funny without laughter.

In the conclusion of the novel, Melody picks up the pieces, arranging Mat's funeral, obtaining two hundred fifty dollars from the company for Chinatown's accident, and finding a place for them to start anew in a black ghetto in Pittsburgh. Riding a train out of the steel mill, as they had in different circumstances into the area, the brothers meet a black ex-soldier who also has been blinded. As the two blind men talk, Chinatown learns that the ex-soldier cannot stop hearing a particular sound. When Chinatown fails to hear the sound, the ex-soldier describes it: "'There, it soundin' off again!' he cried. 'Hear it? Boom!… Boom!… Boom!…'" Chinatown is still perplexed, and the other blind man adds that the noise comes from guns, perhaps a hundred miles away. Chinatown strains with ears rendered more acute from his loss of sight until he, too, believes he hears the guns:

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

For the last time, Chinatown is playing the wishing game. Largely because of the terrible accident, which took the one faculty essential to his identity—sight—Chinatown is further abandoning actuality for a preferred realm, a world where wish becomes reality.

The author's description of Chinatown and the ex-soldier in this final scene implies that many blacks have been permanently wounded by white society, left with little more than a life on the sidelines given over to some form of the wishing game. Although Melody has suffered greatly, too, he retains his unique ability to perceive events realistically. This is the sole hopeful quality emerging from the grim conclusion:

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.