Blood on the Forge
Encyclopedia
Blood on the Forge is a migration novel
by the African American
writer William Attaway
set in the steel valley of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
during the 1920s. The novel follows the Moss brothers as they escape the inequality of sharecropping
in the South for the inequality of mill
working in the North. The novel illustrates the tragedy and hardships many Black Americans faced during the Great Migration
. Attaway's novel mimics his family's migration from North to South when he was a child, and could be the inspiration for the novel. The novel showcases the political fervor in the 1920's, specifically the rise of the proletariat in America and the oppression and racism Black Americans faced in the United States. Blood on the Forge touches on themes such as the destruction of nature, the emptiness and hunger that the working characters experience, the complications of the individual in a depersonalized world, and the myth of the American Dream
. Attaway's use of colloquial dialogue aligns it to other migration narratives by authors like Richard Wright
and John Steinbeck
.
, Illinois
, in what became known as the Great Migration
. From 1910 to 1930, approximately six million African-Americans moved from the rural southern United States to the industrialized north. The northern states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, New York and Michigan received the majority of the migrating African Americans. Factors motivating blacks to migrate north included job opportunities, many of which involved industrialized labour, and escaping the harsh racial climate of the south, deadly lynch mobs, low wages and poverty. Neighborhoods saw a drastic change in population and in issues concerning housing. Many cultural movements were spawned due to the large influx of black populations, including the advancement of jazz music and artistic flourishments such as the harlem renaissance
.
In Blood on the Forge, the Moss Brothers work in the iron mills in the North, and the book describes the tough conditions iron
workers faced working in the blazing hot conditions where the blast furnaces would reach up to 2000°C in order to smelt the iron. The Moss brothers were escaping the post-reconstruction era of the South where they faced racism, lynchings and the ineffectual life many African-Americans faced in the South as sharecroppers.
The novel opens in Kentucky, in the year 1919. Sharecropping half-brothers Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody Moss are in dire straits as they have no mule, and are therefore unable to work their land. After their old mule dragged their mother to her death, Big Mat killed it in a fit of rage. The landowner, Mr. Johnston, finally agrees to give the brothers another mule.
When Big Mat goes to Mr. Johnston’s riding boss to collect the mule he had been promised, the riding boss refuses to give him the mule, and makes a racist comment about the departed Mrs. Moss. In response, Big Mat attacks the riding boss, possibly killing him. Taking the mule, Big Mat runs home. Earlier that day, Chinatown and Melody are visited by a white man on horseback. The man gives them a ten dollar bill, promising much more if the brothers leave that night on a train taking them North, to work. When Big Mat returns with the mule that evening, Melody and Chinatown tell him what the stranger said. Big Mat decides that he and his brothers will head North that very evening.
Part Two
Part Two, the shortest of the novel, chronicles the inhumane conditions of the train in which the Moss brothers are shipped north to Pennsylvania.
Part Three
The Moss brothers arrive at a mill town near Pittsburgh. There they work in the steel mill and live together in a bunkhouse with the other workers of the mill. Chinatown and Melody go to a Mexican madam named Sugar Mama where they meet Sugar Mama’s niece Anna, whom Melody becomes infatuated with.
Chinatown and Melody convince Big Mat to come with them to a dog fight. When Anna rushes into the ring to prevent the death of one of the dogs, she is hit by the dog’s owner. Big Mat responds by punching the man, which leads to a riot. After the fight breaks up, Anna rushes up to Big Mat and kisses him before running away again.
Big Mat takes Anna away from Sugar Mamma and sets up house with her in a small shack. Melody brings a letter from Hattie to Big Mat’s shack only to find Anna there alone. When he tells Anna about the letter she tries to snatch it from him; the two wrestle over the letter. The struggle culminates in Melody and Anna having sex.
There is a catastrophic accident at the mill that kills 14 men and blinds Chinatown. After this tragedy, the labor union becomes very active and gains many new members. The atmosphere of the town becomes increasingly hostile; the foreign mill workers are hostile towards the African American workers, who are the only group that refuse to join the union.
Big Mat is recruited by the sheriff, who is impressed with Big Mat's strength, to be a deputy and help combat the growing union. Once deputized, Mat is told that he is a boss in the town; after a lifetime of oppression, this new feeling of authority goes to Big Mat’s head like fresh whiskey.
Melody decides to take Chinatown out one night to visit some prostitutes to cheer him up. Once at the brothel, Melody finds out that Anna has been working there. Melody returns home and tries to convince Anna to run away with him. Big Mat overhears them, and beats Anna with his brass-studded belt. Sugar Mama comes in after Big Mat has left and takes Anna away.
That night, Big Mat goes with the Sheriff and his deputies to raid the union headquarters. In the midst of the action, Big Mat is repeatedly hit on the back of the head with a pickaxe handle by a young Slavic union member. Big Mat is killed by the blows.
The book ends with Melody and Chinatown leaving the mill town as they take a train to Pittsburgh, where they plan to live.
One important aspect of the Migration Narrative is its emphasis on the differences between the traditional or folk, and the modern. At the beginning of the novel, the brothers are on a train leaving home with hope for a better life in the North. We see a similar image at the end of the novel, with Melody and Chinatown traveling to start over again. Migration narratives typically include references to ancestors and strangers, with ancestors being linked to the South and strangers to the North. Ancestors are also linked with folklore and tradition, such as music and food. Melody tries to keep this alive with his guitar. Strangers can be both the displaced migrants and the people they meet in the North. In Blood on the Forge, the immigrants the Moss brothers work with in the mills would be considered strangers. Each brother experiences his own shift from the folk to the industrial that is characteristic of The Great Migration. Melody changes the way he plays the guitar from slicking the chords, as he did at home to slicking them. Chinatown loses his eyes in an accidental explosion in the mills. His eyes were what distinguished him from his brothers because they were slightly slanted. He must now adapt to the industrial world as a blind man. Big Mat is the last one to leave behind his tradition. He becomes a deputy, using force to stop the workers' strike. Edward E. Waldron describes him as becoming "as destructive as the exploding furnace" (Waldron 58). http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/3041207?&Search=yes&searchText=william&searchText=attaway&searchText=blood&searchText=forge&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dblood%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bforge%2Bwilliam%2Battaway%26gw%3Djtx%26acc%3Don%26prq%3Dblood%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bforge%26Search%3DSearch%26hp%3D25%26wc%3Don&prevSearch=&item=2&ttl=77&returnArticleService=showFullText
Griffin describes four moments that occur in migration narratives. Not all migration narratives have all four, and they need not occur in this order. 1) An event that propels action north. In Blood on the Forge, this event is the opportunity for new jobs and a better life. 2) Presentation of the initial confrontation within the urban landscape. The first confrontation the Moss brothers have is when they get off the train and arrive in the city for their new job. As they do this, the meet immigrants and are confronted with the diversity and entirely different atmosphere of the urban landscape 3) Illustration of attempt to negotiate. The bulk of the novel is the brothers trying to deal with this new lifestyle. 4) Vision of possibilities or limitations of the North. We see both limitations and possibilities of the North in this novel. At the end as Melody and Chinatown leave for a new opportunity in a new city, there is a sense of possibility for a better situation than the previous one. Limitations of the North can be seen in several instances throughout the story. Chinatown loses his eyes in a fatal explosion in the mills, and Big Mat loses his life trying to gain respect. http://books.google.com/books?id=5bX-oS1XAXUC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
. For example, in a conversation between Hattie and Big Mat, Hattie says, "But Mat, you kin try-jest so's ever'thin' be all right jest this one time" (Attaway 24). This sentence is typical of the way the brothers and other African American workers speak. Attaway portrays the Southern accent with "kin" and "jest." Also, African-American ebonics
, which are a used prominently within the text, give the characters a sense of culture, place, time and racial identity. Attaway depicts the rest of the ethnic groups with slightly accented broken English. We most commonly see Hispanic and Slavic accents, with a few Irish and Italian accents as well. For example, one of the first new people the brothers meet, Bo, tells them "The outhouse always full of flies. Smells because nobody sprinkle ashes like they supposed to" (Attaway 51). Although his ethnicity is not indicated, Bo's broken English is slightly different from the brothers'. He leaves out articles (such as "is") and does not use verb tense (such as "sprinkle" instead of "sprinkles," which is grammatically correct in standard English
). Through his speech, it is clear that Bo and the brothers are from different places, giving them different ways of speaking.
Edward E. Waldron claims that Big Mat represents "the last side of the complete folk culture, religion, and an equally important tie to the soil." John Claborn asserts that while Melody and Chinatown become destroyed in the North, Big Mat "thrives" in his new home, as he, "identifies more with the machines than with his fellow white workers, for they allow him to flourish in a way denied him by Jim Crow."
Edward E. Waldron claims that Chinatown's main concern in life is to make himself unique, to be noticed as special; his gold tooth provides relief for this concern, and "looking at the tooth shining back at him from his mirror image gives Chinatown a real sense of being somebody." Stacy I. Morgan claims that the tooth represents Chinatown's "fragile sense of self-esteem," and that he "fixes on the gold tooth as a way of struggling to affirm his individuality and humanity in the face of a socioeconomic system that would otherwise reduce him to a faceless sharecropper."
In an article published in MFS Modern Fiction Studies
, John Claborn claims that Smothers is, "a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain." Claborn notes that Smother's legs have been mutilated in a violent steel mill incident, claiming that, "Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, and made into steel."
After Smothers dies in a mill accident, his co-workers memorialize him by turning the steel scraps from the accident into watch fobs, wearing these around their necks for luck.
The Moss brothers idealize nature, looking back on their homeland of Kentucky with a certain pastoral
fondness. However, although the nature of the South is idealized, in both the North and the South nature is dying. In the South, Attaway highlights the barren land, Mat’s barren wife Hattie, the family’s extreme hunger, the death of their mother, and the drudgery of plowing all day with no reward. Likewise, the urban landscape of the North is also painted as dismal, and dying. In the North, Attaway shows the defilement of natural landscape, evident "in the pollution of the 'dirty-as-a-catfish-hole river with a beautiful name: the Monongahela
," as well as the "'mountains of red ore, yellow limestone, and black coke,' that line the river banks."
Attaway’s use of "mules" in both the South and North, in different contexts, highlights the Moss brothers "unfamiliarity of the artifacts of industrial technology" as well as the similarities between the two places." Mules refers to the animal in the south, but in the mills mules are "small engines that hauled steel along the river front," not living creatures." The mules, though in the South are a part of nature and the pastoral nostalgia felt by the Moss brothers, essentially serve the same function as the mules of the mills; both types of mules perform a mechanized, repetitive task. In addition, Stacy I. Morgan argues that Attaway calls attention to the mechanized mules not only to contrast with the animals of sharecropping, but to call attention to the mule's prominence within African American history and folklore. Morgan also claims that Attaway "indirectly evokes America's unfulfilled promises of enfranchisement ('forty acres and a mule
') as well as the long-standing identification of African American men with the mule as a creature that stubbornly endures despite being much abused as a beast of burden."
In addition, Attaway shows the danger of destroying nature, as when Smothers repeatedly warns his fellow mill workers of the destructive power of the machines; and though the others seem to see his prophecies as merely "half-mad, shrill rants," Claborn argues that "Attaway goes out of his way to invest him with a strange dignity and characterize him as a Tiresian speaker of truth." Smothers sees that destruction of nature "can lead to can lead to industrial accidents, understood as the land avenging itself against humans."
so hungry that they chose to smoke or chew tobacco to try to suppress their appetites. Metaphorically, they are "hungry" for something more in their lives, as they have so little. One way that they deal with this hunger is through music, and the novel opens with Melody playing the "hungry blues" on his guitar.
Another way for the brothers to look past their hunger is with their "wishing game," where Melody and Chinatown fantasize about a fun, simple day in the city; and once they are in the city they fantasize about being in the country. They experience this emotional, existential
hunger in both locations. Stacy I. Morgan argues that they desire things that remain "ever out of reach," which shows that "the existential dimension of Attaway's hunger metaphor arises precisely out of this perpetually deferred set of desires."
, Edward E. Waldron claims that Attaway depicts an intricate examination of the "death of the blues," or the death of folk culture, with the Moss brothers' move from the South to the North. The changes in Melody and Chinatown reflect the overall changes that southern blacks experienced in the Great Migration
, as they have to leave their folk ways behind in order to survive their new, "industriallly-oriented environment."
Stacy I. Morgan also alludes to the ways in which the Brothers mind-set has shifted upon migrating to the North. Their income, which has been met or surpassed gives them new opportunities and multiple ways to spend their new capital emphasizing instant gratification "
Morgan also notes that the Moss Brothers' fear in the train scene, during their hasty move from Kentucky to the North, may be Attway's way of highlighting an issue confronting many who moved during the Great Migration: the "absence of material links to the family, community, and lifeways of former homes, which w[as] frequently demanded by the circumstances of the migration journey northward—a journey that, for many African Americans, did necessarily commence under cover of night." Morgan asserts that with the absence of these links to their former selves, it was especially difficult for the migrants to retain any former cultural identity in their new homes.
Phyllis R. Klotman looks at the ways in which the three brothers bodies became tools and apart of machine, “Chinatown is blinded in an accident which eats up the lives of fourteen men; Melody’s hand is smashed so that he is no longer able to play the guitar; Big Mat is killed during the strike which he has become as unwitting tool the bosses wield against the white workers” suggesting that, “The three brother are systematically unmanned by the dehumanizing process of forging steel”.
One of the tragic outcomes in the novel, according to Klotman, is the loss of continuity in the lives of men who are almost human sacrifices to the industrial Moloch created by an unseen hand grasping for profits.
By wearing scraps of the steel that killed Smothers, John Claborn argues that the workers "give the steel a ritual value that escapes the logic of exchange value; these scraps open up a space for resistance, insofar as they signify the workers' communal bonding." With this act, Attaway may signify a "shift in the workers' consciousness," as "the narration itself seems to gain a heightened awareness of the connection between steel and the ground." In addition, Claborn feels that "Smothers is ritually sacrificed for the sake of more direct commentary on steel production as a globally interdependent process." As Attaway wrote, "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."
Claborn claims that Big Mat embodies the link between mechanic and racial violence. Once he is deputized, given power by the white law enforcement, and charged to "suppress the white workers," he "relishes the terror he inspires." Claborn notes that, "once the strike begins and the furnaces start to cool down because there are not enough workers to keep them burning, Big Mat single-handedly tries to keep the machines functioning," and claims that this "impossible effort" shows that "Big Mat has himself become a machine." "Only as he dies […] does Big Mat glimpse the reality that, in siding with the mill owners and in becoming a machine, he has become an agent of oppression."
The character Anna in particular illustrates another aspect of the American myth, according to Stacy I. Morgan, as Anna dreams of becoming "like the Americanos." However, Morgan writes, she attempts to move up in class by wearing shiny heels and an elaborate gown, and thereby "misapprehends the complexity of American class identity by reducing it to material cultural signs." Eventually, her dress becomes filthy from being dragged in the mud, and Anna must wear it "pinned like a diaper between her legs," which Morgan claims illustrates how that "the icon intended as a symbol of maturity and class status" becomes a symbol of "Anna's childishness." In addition, Morgan notes that Anna is "tragically pathetic," forbidden by Big Mat to go out in public, the space "for which such ostentatious apparel is designed."
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by the African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
writer William Attaway
William Attaway
William Alexander Attaway was an African American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.-Early Life:...
set in the steel valley of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
during the 1920s. The novel follows the Moss brothers as they escape the inequality of sharecropping
Sharecropping
Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land . This should not be confused with a crop fixed rent contract, in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a fixed amount of...
in the South for the inequality of mill
Steel mill
A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel.Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. It is produced in a two-stage process. First, iron ore is reduced or smelted with coke and limestone in a blast furnace, producing molten iron which is either cast into pig iron or...
working in the North. The novel illustrates the tragedy and hardships many Black Americans faced during the Great Migration
Great Migration
Great Migration, Great Migrations, or The Great Migration may refer:In history:* Great Migration of Puritans from England to New England * Great Serb Migrations from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg Monarchy...
. Attaway's novel mimics his family's migration from North to South when he was a child, and could be the inspiration for the novel. The novel showcases the political fervor in the 1920's, specifically the rise of the proletariat in America and the oppression and racism Black Americans faced in the United States. Blood on the Forge touches on themes such as the destruction of nature, the emptiness and hunger that the working characters experience, the complications of the individual in a depersonalized world, and the myth of the American Dream
American Dream
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each...
. Attaway's use of colloquial dialogue aligns it to other migration narratives by authors like Richard Wright
Richard Wright
Richard Wright may refer to:* Richard Wright , African-American novelist, writer, poet, essayist* Richard Wright , also known as Rick Wright, English musician, founding member of Pink Floyd...
and John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
.
Background
During the 1910s, author William Attaway traveled with his family as a child from the segregated south of Mississippi to the northern city of ChicagoChicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, in what became known as the Great Migration
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
. From 1910 to 1930, approximately six million African-Americans moved from the rural southern United States to the industrialized north. The northern states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, New York and Michigan received the majority of the migrating African Americans. Factors motivating blacks to migrate north included job opportunities, many of which involved industrialized labour, and escaping the harsh racial climate of the south, deadly lynch mobs, low wages and poverty. Neighborhoods saw a drastic change in population and in issues concerning housing. Many cultural movements were spawned due to the large influx of black populations, including the advancement of jazz music and artistic flourishments such as the harlem renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
.
In Blood on the Forge, the Moss Brothers work in the iron mills in the North, and the book describes the tough conditions iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
workers faced working in the blazing hot conditions where the blast furnaces would reach up to 2000°C in order to smelt the iron. The Moss brothers were escaping the post-reconstruction era of the South where they faced racism, lynchings and the ineffectual life many African-Americans faced in the South as sharecroppers.
Plot summary
Part OneThe novel opens in Kentucky, in the year 1919. Sharecropping half-brothers Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody Moss are in dire straits as they have no mule, and are therefore unable to work their land. After their old mule dragged their mother to her death, Big Mat killed it in a fit of rage. The landowner, Mr. Johnston, finally agrees to give the brothers another mule.
When Big Mat goes to Mr. Johnston’s riding boss to collect the mule he had been promised, the riding boss refuses to give him the mule, and makes a racist comment about the departed Mrs. Moss. In response, Big Mat attacks the riding boss, possibly killing him. Taking the mule, Big Mat runs home. Earlier that day, Chinatown and Melody are visited by a white man on horseback. The man gives them a ten dollar bill, promising much more if the brothers leave that night on a train taking them North, to work. When Big Mat returns with the mule that evening, Melody and Chinatown tell him what the stranger said. Big Mat decides that he and his brothers will head North that very evening.
Part Two
Part Two, the shortest of the novel, chronicles the inhumane conditions of the train in which the Moss brothers are shipped north to Pennsylvania.
Part Three
The Moss brothers arrive at a mill town near Pittsburgh. There they work in the steel mill and live together in a bunkhouse with the other workers of the mill. Chinatown and Melody go to a Mexican madam named Sugar Mama where they meet Sugar Mama’s niece Anna, whom Melody becomes infatuated with.
Chinatown and Melody convince Big Mat to come with them to a dog fight. When Anna rushes into the ring to prevent the death of one of the dogs, she is hit by the dog’s owner. Big Mat responds by punching the man, which leads to a riot. After the fight breaks up, Anna rushes up to Big Mat and kisses him before running away again.
Big Mat takes Anna away from Sugar Mamma and sets up house with her in a small shack. Melody brings a letter from Hattie to Big Mat’s shack only to find Anna there alone. When he tells Anna about the letter she tries to snatch it from him; the two wrestle over the letter. The struggle culminates in Melody and Anna having sex.
There is a catastrophic accident at the mill that kills 14 men and blinds Chinatown. After this tragedy, the labor union becomes very active and gains many new members. The atmosphere of the town becomes increasingly hostile; the foreign mill workers are hostile towards the African American workers, who are the only group that refuse to join the union.
Big Mat is recruited by the sheriff, who is impressed with Big Mat's strength, to be a deputy and help combat the growing union. Once deputized, Mat is told that he is a boss in the town; after a lifetime of oppression, this new feeling of authority goes to Big Mat’s head like fresh whiskey.
Melody decides to take Chinatown out one night to visit some prostitutes to cheer him up. Once at the brothel, Melody finds out that Anna has been working there. Melody returns home and tries to convince Anna to run away with him. Big Mat overhears them, and beats Anna with his brass-studded belt. Sugar Mama comes in after Big Mat has left and takes Anna away.
That night, Big Mat goes with the Sheriff and his deputies to raid the union headquarters. In the midst of the action, Big Mat is repeatedly hit on the back of the head with a pickaxe handle by a young Slavic union member. Big Mat is killed by the blows.
The book ends with Melody and Chinatown leaving the mill town as they take a train to Pittsburgh, where they plan to live.
Proletarian literature
Blood on the Forge represents the genre of proletarian literature, works usually representing the years surrounding the Great Depression. The experience of the characters in the novel represent the class struggles during the time of the Great Migration and the hardships of African American workers at the time. The Moss brothers are realistically depicted as "emerging black proletariat(s)."Migration narrative
Attaway's novel is also a Migration Narrative, tracing the journey of African American brothers from Southern farm life to the industrial North. A Migration Narrative is just that, a story that follows African American characters on a journey from South to North. Lawrence R. Rogders states that there are four kinds of Migration Narratives, the Early Migration Novel, the Harlem Renaissance, the Fugitive Migration Novel, and finally the Communal Migrant Novel, which is post Depression.http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/2901397?seq=1 Blood on the Forge would be considered an Early Migration Novel because of its time placed in the early 20th century and its industrial subject matter. Rodgers explains that Harlem Renaissance works do not discuss the actual migration, only what came of it, and in her review of Rodgers’ “Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel,” Farrah Jasmine Griffin states, “If the Harlem Renaissance writers failed to make the most of the migration novel form, the generation that followed—fueled by the depression economy, personal deprivation, and a strong sense of displacement—put migration at the center, not the periphery, of its artistic imagination” (Griffin, 532 ). In particular, Chicago writers such as Attaway were responding to the failures of Harlem Renaissance writers to express the first wave of African American migration.http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/2901397?seq=1One important aspect of the Migration Narrative is its emphasis on the differences between the traditional or folk, and the modern. At the beginning of the novel, the brothers are on a train leaving home with hope for a better life in the North. We see a similar image at the end of the novel, with Melody and Chinatown traveling to start over again. Migration narratives typically include references to ancestors and strangers, with ancestors being linked to the South and strangers to the North. Ancestors are also linked with folklore and tradition, such as music and food. Melody tries to keep this alive with his guitar. Strangers can be both the displaced migrants and the people they meet in the North. In Blood on the Forge, the immigrants the Moss brothers work with in the mills would be considered strangers. Each brother experiences his own shift from the folk to the industrial that is characteristic of The Great Migration. Melody changes the way he plays the guitar from slicking the chords, as he did at home to slicking them. Chinatown loses his eyes in an accidental explosion in the mills. His eyes were what distinguished him from his brothers because they were slightly slanted. He must now adapt to the industrial world as a blind man. Big Mat is the last one to leave behind his tradition. He becomes a deputy, using force to stop the workers' strike. Edward E. Waldron describes him as becoming "as destructive as the exploding furnace" (Waldron 58). http://0-www.jstor.org.opac.sfsu.edu/stable/3041207?&Search=yes&searchText=william&searchText=attaway&searchText=blood&searchText=forge&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dblood%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bforge%2Bwilliam%2Battaway%26gw%3Djtx%26acc%3Don%26prq%3Dblood%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bforge%26Search%3DSearch%26hp%3D25%26wc%3Don&prevSearch=&item=2&ttl=77&returnArticleService=showFullText
Form of The Migration Narrative
In her book, Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative, Farah Jasmine Griffin explains that the Migration Narrative is a dominant form in African American culture. According to her, Lawrence Rodgers is the first to identify migration with the emergence of a new genre: The Great Migration Novel. This type of work that Blood on the Forge is associated with has a specific narrative form. In relation to the dominant white society, all migrants are strangers; foreigners driven by persecution to wander in search of a new home. In Attaway’s novel, the mill workers all fall under this category. The Moss brothers work with foreign immigrants as well as other migrants such as themselves from the south. Within the context of the African American community, the stranger is that figure who possesses no connections to the community. As they migrate to the industrial North, the Moss brothers leave their home and traditions, and start over in a place where they have no connections. http://books.google.com/books?id=5bX-oS1XAXUC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=falseGriffin describes four moments that occur in migration narratives. Not all migration narratives have all four, and they need not occur in this order. 1) An event that propels action north. In Blood on the Forge, this event is the opportunity for new jobs and a better life. 2) Presentation of the initial confrontation within the urban landscape. The first confrontation the Moss brothers have is when they get off the train and arrive in the city for their new job. As they do this, the meet immigrants and are confronted with the diversity and entirely different atmosphere of the urban landscape 3) Illustration of attempt to negotiate. The bulk of the novel is the brothers trying to deal with this new lifestyle. 4) Vision of possibilities or limitations of the North. We see both limitations and possibilities of the North in this novel. At the end as Melody and Chinatown leave for a new opportunity in a new city, there is a sense of possibility for a better situation than the previous one. Limitations of the North can be seen in several instances throughout the story. Chinatown loses his eyes in a fatal explosion in the mills, and Big Mat loses his life trying to gain respect. http://books.google.com/books?id=5bX-oS1XAXUC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Dialogue
Attaway uses working class vernacular of the early 1900's. Because the workers the Moss brothers associate with are from different parts of the world, each ethnic group within the mills has slightly different speech. The Moss brothers speak in Southern African American vernacular EnglishAfrican American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...
. For example, in a conversation between Hattie and Big Mat, Hattie says, "But Mat, you kin try-jest so's ever'thin' be all right jest this one time" (Attaway 24). This sentence is typical of the way the brothers and other African American workers speak. Attaway portrays the Southern accent with "kin" and "jest." Also, African-American ebonics
Ebonics
Ebonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from enslaved Africans, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America...
, which are a used prominently within the text, give the characters a sense of culture, place, time and racial identity. Attaway depicts the rest of the ethnic groups with slightly accented broken English. We most commonly see Hispanic and Slavic accents, with a few Irish and Italian accents as well. For example, one of the first new people the brothers meet, Bo, tells them "The outhouse always full of flies. Smells because nobody sprinkle ashes like they supposed to" (Attaway 51). Although his ethnicity is not indicated, Bo's broken English is slightly different from the brothers'. He leaves out articles (such as "is") and does not use verb tense (such as "sprinkle" instead of "sprinkles," which is grammatically correct in standard English
Standard English
Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
). Through his speech, it is clear that Bo and the brothers are from different places, giving them different ways of speaking.
Big Mat
Big Mat is the eldest of the three Moss brothers. In Part One of Attaway's novel he is employed as a sharecropper on Mr. Johnston's farm in Kentucky. Of the three brothers Big Mat's most notable attributes are his physical size/strength, his rage, and his constant need to be a provider for his family. After the brothers migrate to Pennsylvania Big Mat focuses heavily on doing well at his new job at the steel mill and saving money in order to bring his wife Hattie off of the Kentucky farm and to live with him. Big Mat gains attention, recognition, and the nickname "Black Irish" for his determination at the mill after saving one of the foreman from a dangerous accident. Eventually, Big Mat enters into a relationship with Anna, ignoring his previous efforts to send for his wife. Mat continues to use his physical strength as a weapon against others until his death during the raid of the Union Headquarters. According to Phillip H. Vaughan's article "From Pastorialism to Industrialism Antipathy in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge" Attaway uses Big Mat's character to represents "the plodding strength and endurance of all Southern Negroes under their particular color-caste system".Edward E. Waldron claims that Big Mat represents "the last side of the complete folk culture, religion, and an equally important tie to the soil." John Claborn asserts that while Melody and Chinatown become destroyed in the North, Big Mat "thrives" in his new home, as he, "identifies more with the machines than with his fellow white workers, for they allow him to flourish in a way denied him by Jim Crow."
Chinatown Moss
Chinatown is a younger half sibling to Big Mat (fathered by a White sharecropper). Chinatown resists sharecropping work, instead enjoying a lazy and carefree lifestyle on the Kentucky farm. Chinatown focuses on his own needs before those of the family, using money that could have been spent purchasing food on a gold tooth. After leaving the farm, Chinatown, succumbing to the temptations offered by city life in Pennsylvania, becomes fascinated with drinking, gambling, and hiring prostitutes. Midway through the novel, Chinatown is left blind after an accident at the steel mill and is forced out of work and into the care of Big Mat and Melody. Phillip H. Vaughan argues that Chinatown's "lazy, happy-go-lucky attitude reflects in part a psychological response to the subjugated position of the Negroes" following the abolition of slavery.Edward E. Waldron claims that Chinatown's main concern in life is to make himself unique, to be noticed as special; his gold tooth provides relief for this concern, and "looking at the tooth shining back at him from his mirror image gives Chinatown a real sense of being somebody." Stacy I. Morgan claims that the tooth represents Chinatown's "fragile sense of self-esteem," and that he "fixes on the gold tooth as a way of struggling to affirm his individuality and humanity in the face of a socioeconomic system that would otherwise reduce him to a faceless sharecropper."
Melody Moss
Melody, like Chinatown, is a younger half-sibling to Big Mat. Melody's love for music, specifically through use of his guitar, is his primary use of time on the sharecropping farm in Kentucky. Once the brothers migrate to Pennsylvania, Melody is forced to work in the steel mills alongside his brothers manning the blast furnace. Similar to Chinatown, Melody also enjoys prostitutes, and develops a fondness and attraction to Anna (who is later pursued by Big Mat). According to Vaughan, Melody's blues singing "recreates and sustains the pastoral myth... and an existence characterized by iages of hunger, barrenness, and drudgery".Hattie
Hattie is Big Mat's wife. When the Moss Brothers travel North, Hattie is left behind pregnant. Big Mat receives a letter from Hattie saying that she fell and lost the baby.Anna
Anna is fourteen or fifteen years old and Sugar Mama's niece. Sugar Mama sent for Anna from New Mexico thinking she would bring more business. At first, Anna tries to sleep with Melody, but when Big Mat hits an owner at the dog fight after he hits Anna, she become infatuated with Big Mat. Anna endures Big Mat's beatings.Smothers
Smothers is a crippled laborer.In an article published in MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Modern Fiction Studies
Modern Fiction Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1955 at Purdue University's Department of English, where it is still edited. It publishes general and themed issues on the topic of modernist and contemporary fiction using original research from literary scholars. It seeks...
, John Claborn claims that Smothers is, "a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain." Claborn notes that Smother's legs have been mutilated in a violent steel mill incident, claiming that, "Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, and made into steel."
After Smothers dies in a mill accident, his co-workers memorialize him by turning the steel scraps from the accident into watch fobs, wearing these around their necks for luck.
Mr. Johnston
The Moss Brothers work on Mr. Johnson's lang in Kentucky, tending his crops. In Part One, Big Mat is able to convince Mr. Johnston to allow him to take a bag of guts home with him, as food. Mr. Johnston had stopped giving the family food credit on account of a dead mule. In payment for the mule, Mr. Johnston claimed their share of the crop for the next two years. Mr. Johnston tells Big Mat that he will give him a mule and offers the brothers work. Mr. Johnston hopes this favor will help to convince the brothers that working there is better than going to work in the North.Riding Boss
Big Mat describes the Kentucky Riding Boss as a formerly poor sharecropper. When Big Mat goes to get the mule he was promised by Mr. Johnston, the Riding Boss, eager to exert his power, orders Big Mat to leave and go home. The Riding Boss insults and whips Big Mat. Big Mat loses his temper and kills the Riding Boss, prompting the brothers' departure to the north.Bo
Bo is the "boss of stove gang" who catches Chinatown and Melody staring at the woman with the "rotted" breast. Bo points Chinatown and Melody in the right direction of the bunkhouse.Mike
Mike is an Italian open-hearth worker who helped the brothers learn the ropes around the mill.Zanski
Zanski is an old, Slavic laborer who works with the brothers in the pit and works at the lunch car with his granddaughter, Rosie. He's eventually fired from the mills.Rosie
Rosie is Zanski's granddaughter who waitresses at the lunch car. Later in the novel it is revealed that she also works as a prostitute.Nature
There is something very timely in Attaway’s implicit warning, as Edward Margolies suggests in his introduction to the 1969 edition of the novel: Possibly he [Attaway] saw his worst fears realized in the rapid spread industrial wastelands and the consequent plight of urban Negroes. From one point of view his feelings about the sanctity of nature now seem almost quaint in an age of cybernetics.The Moss brothers idealize nature, looking back on their homeland of Kentucky with a certain pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
fondness. However, although the nature of the South is idealized, in both the North and the South nature is dying. In the South, Attaway highlights the barren land, Mat’s barren wife Hattie, the family’s extreme hunger, the death of their mother, and the drudgery of plowing all day with no reward. Likewise, the urban landscape of the North is also painted as dismal, and dying. In the North, Attaway shows the defilement of natural landscape, evident "in the pollution of the 'dirty-as-a-catfish-hole river with a beautiful name: the Monongahela
Monongahela River
The Monongahela River is a river on the Allegheny Plateau in north-central West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania in the United States...
," as well as the "'mountains of red ore, yellow limestone, and black coke,' that line the river banks."
Attaway’s use of "mules" in both the South and North, in different contexts, highlights the Moss brothers "unfamiliarity of the artifacts of industrial technology" as well as the similarities between the two places." Mules refers to the animal in the south, but in the mills mules are "small engines that hauled steel along the river front," not living creatures." The mules, though in the South are a part of nature and the pastoral nostalgia felt by the Moss brothers, essentially serve the same function as the mules of the mills; both types of mules perform a mechanized, repetitive task. In addition, Stacy I. Morgan argues that Attaway calls attention to the mechanized mules not only to contrast with the animals of sharecropping, but to call attention to the mule's prominence within African American history and folklore. Morgan also claims that Attaway "indirectly evokes America's unfulfilled promises of enfranchisement ('forty acres and a mule
40 acres and a mule
40 acres and a mule refers to the short-lived policy, during the last stages of the American Civil War in 1865, of providing arable land to black former slaves who had become free as a result of the advance of the Union armies into the territory previously controlled by the Confederacy,...
') as well as the long-standing identification of African American men with the mule as a creature that stubbornly endures despite being much abused as a beast of burden."
In addition, Attaway shows the danger of destroying nature, as when Smothers repeatedly warns his fellow mill workers of the destructive power of the machines; and though the others seem to see his prophecies as merely "half-mad, shrill rants," Claborn argues that "Attaway goes out of his way to invest him with a strange dignity and characterize him as a Tiresian speaker of truth." Smothers sees that destruction of nature "can lead to can lead to industrial accidents, understood as the land avenging itself against humans."
Hunger
Attaway depicts how African American sharecroppers were forcibly deprived of many of life's necessities. In their Kentucky life, the Moss brothers had to use newspapers attached to the wall in order to provide a bit of insulation, and they are literallyso hungry that they chose to smoke or chew tobacco to try to suppress their appetites. Metaphorically, they are "hungry" for something more in their lives, as they have so little. One way that they deal with this hunger is through music, and the novel opens with Melody playing the "hungry blues" on his guitar.
Another way for the brothers to look past their hunger is with their "wishing game," where Melody and Chinatown fantasize about a fun, simple day in the city; and once they are in the city they fantasize about being in the country. They experience this emotional, existential
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
hunger in both locations. Stacy I. Morgan argues that they desire things that remain "ever out of reach," which shows that "the existential dimension of Attaway's hunger metaphor arises precisely out of this perpetually deferred set of desires."
North vs South
In an article published by Negro American Literature ForumAfrican American Review
The African American Review is a quarterly academic journal and the official publication of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association. The journal covers African-American literature and culture, including theatre, film, the visual arts, interviews,...
, Edward E. Waldron claims that Attaway depicts an intricate examination of the "death of the blues," or the death of folk culture, with the Moss brothers' move from the South to the North. The changes in Melody and Chinatown reflect the overall changes that southern blacks experienced in the Great Migration
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
, as they have to leave their folk ways behind in order to survive their new, "industriallly-oriented environment."
Stacy I. Morgan also alludes to the ways in which the Brothers mind-set has shifted upon migrating to the North. Their income, which has been met or surpassed gives them new opportunities and multiple ways to spend their new capital emphasizing instant gratification "
Morgan also notes that the Moss Brothers' fear in the train scene, during their hasty move from Kentucky to the North, may be Attway's way of highlighting an issue confronting many who moved during the Great Migration: the "absence of material links to the family, community, and lifeways of former homes, which w[as] frequently demanded by the circumstances of the migration journey northward—a journey that, for many African Americans, did necessarily commence under cover of night." Morgan asserts that with the absence of these links to their former selves, it was especially difficult for the migrants to retain any former cultural identity in their new homes.
Mechanization
Edward E. Waldron claims that Blood On The Forge is a story of "man's changing nature in the face of ever-increasing mechanization." Stacy I. Morgan states that the physical injuries experienced in the mills are extreme examples of the larger process going on: the "transforming [of] workers' sense of time and of their own bodies."Phyllis R. Klotman looks at the ways in which the three brothers bodies became tools and apart of machine, “Chinatown is blinded in an accident which eats up the lives of fourteen men; Melody’s hand is smashed so that he is no longer able to play the guitar; Big Mat is killed during the strike which he has become as unwitting tool the bosses wield against the white workers” suggesting that, “The three brother are systematically unmanned by the dehumanizing process of forging steel”.
One of the tragic outcomes in the novel, according to Klotman, is the loss of continuity in the lives of men who are almost human sacrifices to the industrial Moloch created by an unseen hand grasping for profits.
By wearing scraps of the steel that killed Smothers, John Claborn argues that the workers "give the steel a ritual value that escapes the logic of exchange value; these scraps open up a space for resistance, insofar as they signify the workers' communal bonding." With this act, Attaway may signify a "shift in the workers' consciousness," as "the narration itself seems to gain a heightened awareness of the connection between steel and the ground." In addition, Claborn feels that "Smothers is ritually sacrificed for the sake of more direct commentary on steel production as a globally interdependent process." As Attaway wrote, "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."
Claborn claims that Big Mat embodies the link between mechanic and racial violence. Once he is deputized, given power by the white law enforcement, and charged to "suppress the white workers," he "relishes the terror he inspires." Claborn notes that, "once the strike begins and the furnaces start to cool down because there are not enough workers to keep them burning, Big Mat single-handedly tries to keep the machines functioning," and claims that this "impossible effort" shows that "Big Mat has himself become a machine." "Only as he dies […] does Big Mat glimpse the reality that, in siding with the mill owners and in becoming a machine, he has become an agent of oppression."
Myth of the American Dream and the working class
Attaway's novel depicts how industrial technology dehumanizes working class laborers, shows workers who feel alienated from the products which they produce, and the highlights how capitalism moved towards mechanized standardization and away from individualized artistry and craftsmanship.The character Anna in particular illustrates another aspect of the American myth, according to Stacy I. Morgan, as Anna dreams of becoming "like the Americanos." However, Morgan writes, she attempts to move up in class by wearing shiny heels and an elaborate gown, and thereby "misapprehends the complexity of American class identity by reducing it to material cultural signs." Eventually, her dress becomes filthy from being dragged in the mud, and Anna must wear it "pinned like a diaper between her legs," which Morgan claims illustrates how that "the icon intended as a symbol of maturity and class status" becomes a symbol of "Anna's childishness." In addition, Morgan notes that Anna is "tragically pathetic," forbidden by Big Mat to go out in public, the space "for which such ostentatious apparel is designed."