Blood on the Forge by William Attaway (1941)
Part One
characters:
Melody Moss – native to red-clay hills of Kentucky, guitar player, share-cropper
Big Mat Moss – Melody’s half-brother, big and tall, backer than his half-brothers
Chinatown Moss – Melody’s half-brother, big and tall, gold tooth, oldest brother
Hattie – Big Mat’s wife, tiny
Mr. Johnston - white, landowner
Maw - died 4 weeks before start of story
riding boss - formerly a while sharecropper
setting:
1919: height of the Great Migration, Red Scare, Red Summer (race riots)
Madison
Masonville, Kentucky
plot:
Melody is in the cabin, slicking his guitar and playing the hungry blues. Hattie says that they would not be hungry if Chinatown would sell his gold tooth. Chinatown defends his laziness as a rational response to sharecropping, because labor only leaves you still further in debt. Hattie wonders how Melody, Chinatown and Big Mat's maw could have a son as lazy as Chinatown, and when he says not to let Big Mat hear her talking about his Maw she says that he jut doesn't want her to remind him what happened to the mule. Big Mat had torn the mule to pieces after his mother had died while plowing and then been dragged to the end of the row by the well-trained animal, and Mr, Johnston claimed their share of the food crop for the next two years in payment for the animal. To take their minds off their hunger and hope that Big Mat will return with some pork from killing Mr Johnston's sick pigs, Melody and Chinatown play the wishing game. After a while Hattie says, "Wish night gone and real night come on. Guess I'll light the rag for big Mat," and Melody picks up a song from the rhythm in her words (9-10).
When Big Mat does come home, Melody can read the wound in him. Big Mat had been killing the last pig when Mr. Johnston and the riding boss came by and Mat could tell they were talking about him. Mr, Johnston asks Big Mat to drain the blood from the last sow to make delicious blood sausages, and Big Mat mentions he'd like to finish up killing the last hog and leave the butchering for the next day so he could bring something back to his family. Johnson asks what he aims to bring back and says he could consider Big Matt's labor as payment on the dead mule. Big Mat says it will be hard to make a crop that year without a mule, and that even with one the soil has been running off in the rain and the fertility of the land disappearing. Mr Johnston asks, "You ain't kickin', are you, Mat?" and Mat looks down and says no (15). Mr. Johnston tells Big Mat there are three reasons why he only has blacks work his land: "Well, they's three reasons: niggesrs ain't bothered with the itch; they knows how to make it the best way they kin and they don't kick none" (15). The hog struggles in its death throws at just that moment and Mat explains,"They don't jump till they 'most dead" - to which Johnston replies that his own discourse on black workers has been beyond Mat's understanding. Johnston tells Mat to take a bag of guts for himself and feed the rest to the other hogs. Johnston will give Big Mat a mule to work the land, and his brothers can work off the debt on Johnston's place at 50 cents/week. Johnston warns him against "jacklegs" telling blacks that there is abundant work up north, and admonishes him to remember how well Johnston treats him.
As they prepare the chitterlings, Mat tells Chinatown, Melody and Hattie of his conversation with Mr. Johnston. Melody looks forward to a sack of tobacco and Hattie to some snuff, but Chinatown wonders why Johnston is being so generous of a sudden. Big Mat tells them about Johnston's warning against listening to the jacklegs. That night as the chitterlings begin to cook and Melody and Chinatown go to sleep, Big Mat reads his bible. Hattie has had six miscarriages in a row and Big Mat sees God's hand in it. Melody remembers a day in the fields when he had gone to plow the good muck ground (only good land on their part of the land) and, while Melody had wished he had book learning that would enable him to express himself, Big Mat likened the muck ground to a woman h=who never fails when you plow her. Melody says he ought to have been white to go to school. Big Mat says it's good he's black because a while man could not withstand his sorrow.
As the chitterlings cook, Hattie tells Matt that she feels funny and is fearful of another miscarriage. Mat credits the miscarriages to a curse on him for being born out of wedlock. Mat thinks he has to preach the gospel to overcome the curse and Hattie suggests he preach on Sundays, but he says that when he tries the words stick in his throat. When Hattie keeps at him, Matt hits her on the mouth and she shuts up. Melody falls asleep.
Melody wakes to Hattie's voice saying that the chitterlings are done.
Big Mat finishes butchering the hogs and goes to the house to see about the mule. Mr. Johnston is gone but Mrs. Johnston tells him to speak with the riding boss. Mat sees three mules in the field, two young and strong and one old, and figures the old one must be for him. A sweat bee is bothering htem and he swats it. The riding boss asks what he's doing to the mules and tells him to get back to work. When Mat reminds him that Mr. Johnston promised him a mule, he scolds Mat for not referring to him as sir. In reassuring the riding boss that he remembers who he his, Mat reminds him that their parents used to sharecrop next to one another and the man hits him in the face with a whip. Matt tries to appologize and asks to wait for the mule, but the riding boss says he doesn't think Mat should have a mule - "Killin' a animal worth forty dollars, 'cause a nigger woman got dragged over the rocks - " (28). Big Mat punches the man, then kicks him, breaking his neck but not killing him. Mat leaves in a panic, but brings the old mule with him. Big Mat hauls the Mule over the hills, but in the evening he is not far from his farm.
Melody and Chinatown are waiting for Mat when some white riders approach. They are jacklegs, and say that the men can make more in a month working in the mills up north than they do in a year's sharecropping. A train will leave that night from Masonville Junction and they can ride in a sealed boxcar that won't be opened until they've cleared the state. Mat comes riding up next and shows his welt. The brothers leave for the train that night.
Part Two
characters:
man who opens the boxcar doors
many men packed into boxcar
setting:
sealed boxcar bound for West Virginia
plot:
Big Matt is squatting in a corner in the crowded . The brothers have become separated in the packed car. Melody is feeling bad but the jolting of the car keeps him from playing his guitar. Chinatown is the first to crack up, afraid to sleep because his gold tooth might rattle out. He asks Melody to talk to him to keep him awake.
The train finally stops and the doors are unsealed and opened in West Virginia. A man tells them to come out and stretch their legs. The next day they will be in Allegheny county.
Part Three
characters:
crap shooters - men who have worked at the mill for a long time when the brothers first arrive
Hunkies - Eastern Europeans. spit, throw rocks at brothers when they walk through their neighborhood
prostitute - stunning, left breast rotted off
Bo - small, dark man. boss of a stove gang.
Smoothers - a crippled black some say is wrong in the head
Irish foreman - assigns shifts
Mike - Italian
O'Casey - pit boss
drunken Irishman - drinks some corn whiskey with Melody, wants him to play his guitar
Dusty-butt Jones - one of the old hands, short
Sugar Mama - Mexican prositute
Anna - niece of Sugar Mama
setting:
mill in Alleghany county
plot:
Chinatown, Melody and Big Mat are in a bunkhouse at the mill on the Monongahela river. An old-timer warns the green men about the danger of working on a mill and some of the several ways they can get themselves killed. It is most dangerous for hunkies (Eastern Europeans) who may not understand instructions given in English. The attitudes of the other men speak, like a refrain, their regrets about leaving behind their old homes. The brothers go walking outside and see a girl playing with some other children - they quickly turn and go the other way, afraid that she might scream and get them lynched. They wander into an Eastern European neighborhood where the people seem angry, throw rocks at them. They have lost their bearings and search for the bunkhouse. They see a stunningly beautiful girl whose perfume covers up a rotten smell and a small, dark man, recognizing them by their clothes, says, "Howdy, boys. Green, huh?" and offers to show them back to the bunkhouse. Bo explains that the hunkies' anger at them is because the company always brings in new blacks when there is talk of a strike.
Back in the bunk, an ancient dice game is going on, the Irish foreman announces the shifts, and a black names Smothers talks about how it is wrong to melt the earth for metal. He says the steel fights back - explodes, burns workers, and makes them fight amongst themselves to better accomplish it work. Men should content themselves with using what is on top of the ground. Smothers says you can't blame the ground because it gives warning, and he offers as an example a great hunk of iron that had fallen from the sky. In the morning, they wake to a chain gang song and go to the mill to work. Mike helps the green men by making sure they have the right gear, and they head out with the call for yard and pit men. Their first job is to clean up after a furnace spill, and the speed of Mat's work displeases the other men. one young Slovac drops his pick, saying the stuff is too hot to work. The others do as well, and O'Casey the pit boss yells at Matt, asking if he doesn't know what to do when the stuff it too hot to work. He sends Mat to find a hose. Big Mat hoses off the slag and after they finish the cleanup Chinatown and Melody fall asleep between the furnaces. Big Mat comes to wake them up for another cleanup, and by lunch time Chinatown is too exhausted to eat, Melody feels sick thinking of all the work ahead, and O'Casey has it in for Mat.
After three weeks, the Moss brothers are able to do their work and carouse a little before bed. Melody is trying to find a new music with his guitar - slicking doesn't feel right here, so he's using his fingers. One night, Melody shares some corn whiskey with a drunken Irishman and in his frustration to get Melody to play his guitar, the man calls him a nigger. After a tense moment, the man backs out of the bunkhouse. Chinatown has been playing dice and had a thousand dollars pass through his hands - more than he has ever seen - before a throw puts him out of the game. Big Mat has been talking to Smothers, who predicts he succumb to the curse of the earth and never see Hattie again despite his grand plans of buying a house and bringing her up.
Melody and Chinatown go out to see hookers while Big Mat muses over what Smothers has been telling him.
Melody and Chinatown go to the Mexican shanties, to the shack of Sugar Mama. There is a new girl there, her niece, who is sick and who Big Mama says is lazy. Chinatown takes Sugar Mama to see the dog fight while Melody stays with the wide-faced girl. As it turns out, the girl is not sick. She reveals to Melody her plan not to work and to wait until Big Mama dies and take all her money. Melody gives the girl two dollars and refuses to sleep with her, which angers her.
The next morning Big Mat enters the mill with new confidence. O'Casey, sensing the change, stops picking on him and recommends him for promotion to a pouring crew. Big Mat distinguishes himself in the position. Working on the hot floor beneath the Bessemers, Chinatown gets thirsty and drinks greedily from the hydrant despite warnings. He is sick almost immediately. Melody and the old Slav Zansky look over him between spells. When Melody asks whether anything ever gets to the Slavs, Zansky tells him that what the black workers need is a home life with a real woman (in contrast to the prosititutes Melody points out) and children.
When the Moss brothers get off work, a letter is waiting for Big Matt with news that Hattie has fallen and lost her baby. Chinatown and Melody suggest that Big Matt drink some corn whiskey and he refuses. He agrees to go with them to see a dogfight after their next shift.
Mondays in the mill are difficult with accident and quick tempers. A Slav lets a hot test block fall and it crushes to toe of an Italian, who screams that it was done purposely. The man is taken to the infirmary. The men discuss how at the infirmary patients recieve a daily dose of croton oil to give them diarrhea and make them return to work more quickly. Later, a new "hayseed" (young white American) makes a mistake that throws some concrete in O'Casey's face and O'Casey slaps him. The man nearly kills O'Casey later with a shovel, but Big Mat knocks him out just in time. The men are filled with praise for Mat and the Irish suggest that he must have some Irish in him - "Black Irish" - says O'Casey. All have noticed his strength and work ethic.
Dogfights are held in a barn outside town and include local dogs raised for fighting as well as dogs from as far away as Altoona and Harrisburg. The best dog locally is old Bob Dank's police dog Son. A man brings a bull terrior from Akron and pits it against Son. The dog is smart and a superior fighter, and wins after twenty minutes. Melody sees Sugar Mama during the fight, and she tells him that Anna the flat-faced niece likes him. After the bull terrior gets Dank's dog by the throat and wins, Dank calls for the dogs to be separated only to declare that he will kill the dog himself. Anna rushes in to stop him and he hits her. Big Mat hits Dank and a genral fight ensues in which Big Mat and Chinatown participate. Anna comes rushing up to the brothers afterward and Melody reaches out, but she kisses Big Mat.
On the way home, the brothers stop at every corn joint they can find. Mat drinks with his brothers but never seems drunk. On the way home, they see a ten-year-old girl leave the outhouse with her dress up and her pants down. Some boys see her and she runs but too late, and they drag her into the bushes. Chinatown wonders aloud why the girl does not yell. "Melody knew she could not have yelled out. It was a game they played. Or, better, it was a thing they did that was no game but had rules like a game" (99). Big Mat says that if the girl in the bushes was a few years older and a bit bigger, he's take a turn on her too. Then he throws up, standing up straight where he is. He rushes into the bunkbed, lowers his mattress to the ground with the sleeping Smothers, and goes to sleep on the metal springs. The men comment on the size of his genitals.
Part Four
This section quotes what Anna had said to Melody when they met about the man she would find. "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" (103). Big Mat stays at Sugar Mama's two nights before he rents a shack for himself and Anna. Big Mat performs sexually like Anna had predicted her man would, and buys her the rhinestone heels and new clothes that she had anticipated as well. Big Mat lays off from work for a week, and when he comes back it seems to Melody that he runs on whiskey rather than muscle and Melody feels bad for him. When they part, Big Mat starts to ask whether Melody thinks what he is doing is wrong but he stops, and a gulf remains between them. Melody goes to the cafe to think and gets nowhere.
When Melody returns to the bunkhouse, Chinatown is oiling an old .22 to shoot at rats. Melody tries to talk to Chinatown about what will come of Mat's relationship with Anna, but Chinatown assumes it is nothing - has never understood Mat the way that Melody does. When Melody tries to explain his worries, Chinatown just keeps bragging about the fight at the dogfight. A letter has come from Hattie and Melody drags Chinatown with him to Mat's shack, where he plans to wait for his brother and talk him into sending for Hattie. Anna meets them at the door and lets them in reluctantly. Chinatown asks for corn whiskey and after he laughs a bit and she warms to him, she brings it. Melody and Anna both talk to Chinatown. Feeling an urge to make Anna angry, Melody tells her about the letter. She snatches it from him. They struggle over the letter while trying not to wake Chinatown, and Melody is reminded if the hunky girl's silence when she is dragged into the bushes. Anna goes limp and turns out the kerosene lamp, and they relax after having sex. Anna tells him about her desire to get away from Mexico, and about how she had seen white women there in high heels who came with men who took care of them. The cars of these Americanos would sometimes stop to take photos of the peons with their coats, and Anna did not want to be the one in those photos. As it gets light out, Melody is exhausted and gets up to leave. As he goes, he says that maybe Chinatown will tell Mat about the letter.
Mat comes home to find Anna and Chinatown making strings of dolls from newspaper, and grumbles about there being no food on the table. Chinatown asks if Anna and Mat will be at the dogfights. Anna tells Chinatown that Matt doesn't let her go out so that she has nowhere to wear her fine clothes, and then she invites him to come see her and bring Melody. Sugar Mama arrives at the house and pokes fun at her niece for her pretensions and the fact that Mat keeps her in. Anna runs kicking at Sugar Mama but Chinatown holds her back. Sugar Mama runs when she hears Big Mat slam through the back door, and he kicks her in the back. Sugar Mama curses and throws dirt at the house and then leaves. Chinatown and Big Mat leave the shack while Anna is busy putting on her shoes and unpinning her dance-hall dress.
Chinatown and Big Mat drink until evening and then go to the lunch-car. Smothers is there and says, "Steel going to get ol' Dusty" (120). Chinatown is ready to argue with him but from behind them Zansky says, "Sure, steel get everybody . . . " (121). Back at the bunk, Melody muses over Big Mat having brought everything but his bible when he left. Melody goes to the superintendent and asks to be taken off the hearth and is assigned to the blast furnaces. He looks for Zansky to say goodbye, but Zansky has been in an accident and is no longer fit to work in the mills. When Melody reports to Bo, his new boss, the man is short with him. Approaching him later, Bo explains that he can't let the other men think he is especially nice to black workers. Bo explains that he is the only black in the mill to have Irish working under him.
Melody starts work on his new gang but on the last turn of the day suffers an accident that smashes his right hand (his "picking hand" for the guitar). Melody has been wearied recently by his guitar and is unsure whether he had purposefully allowed Bo's rod to come down on his hand.
Chinatown goes to the cabin where Big Mat lives with Ana looking for Mat to visit Melody in the hospital. Anna's face is bloody where Mat has hit her, and Chinatown brings her into the hospital with him. Three nights before, Anna had come home late with the back of her dress wet and twigs in her hair. Mat had been furious, thinking she had been with a man outside, and she can't explain to him what really happened. She had walked by Sugar Mama's house to make her aunt think that she was on her way to one of the fine houses in the hills, but Sugar Mama had seen through the lie and taunted her. Anna had walked the hills around the houses and then lain on the ground when some cars came into the drive of a house she was watching.
Bo accompanies Melody to the hospital, feeling responsible, but no bones are broken. Melody confides to Bo about his worries concerning Big Mat, and Bo tells him that lots of steel men leave women back home and take up with new ones at the mill. "I don't know why it is, but it ain't nothin' to upset a man" (134). Bo is in a similar situation himself.
Melody and Bo walk into the lunch wagon to a hearty welcome. Bo tells Melody not to worry about his job - that Chinatown will work it for him until his hand heals. Zanski is hanging out behind the counter, much to the annoyance of his daughter Rosie, the waitress. Melody is talking with Zansky when Chinatown comes in yelling that Mat has been jailed near Pittsburgh for trying to kill a man and that Melody has to go bail him out. Melody says Mat can stay in jail, but he leaves for the place near Pittsburgh like he knows he has to.
Chinatown feels strange that morning, as does Smothers who says, "I got grief in my bones." (143). Smothers warns the others. John, the stove tender, claims not to be superstitious but crosses himself anyway. Bo says that if someone is going to get killed and its Smothers, he'll melt him into watch fobs and give one to each of the men to wear on their vests for luck. The hayseed in the gang calls Smothers a nut and, when Smothers swings at him with one of his crutches, he takes both and makes the older man crawl and plead for them before tossing them in the trough. Bo tells Chinatown that during the war some guys would go through the dead with pliers and take the gold teeth from the dead, and black soldiers had to pull out their own gold teeth just to avoid being shot in the back. Bo explains that he can't stop the hayseed bullying Smothers because it would seem like favoritism - "Only one in the mill with micks under him" (148). With his crutches back, Smothers tells the cocky workers how he became crippled. Speaking in the third person, he tells about "one of the best catchers they ever put on a roll table" who worked in the steel mill, made money, had women, drank whiskey, and one day bet that he could walk the roll tables from one end of the mill to the other. The whiskey abandons him halfway through and he crawls on hands and knees trying to get past the table he's on. He almost makes it but the man who was supposed to stop the table got confused and reversed it instead, sending a hot bar across the table walker's legs. The men go on to work more sober.
"That night, when a break came in the long shift, Chinatown walked out of the blast house. He saw the pointed stars of fire along the edge of the Monongahela. He looked up in the sky at the points of fire so much like those along the river. He took his last look at all of these. And he remembered Smothers' words to the green men: "Somethin' dropped right out the sky, blazin' down, lightin' up this old river in the dead of night." That was strange - iron dropping out of the sky. Maybe it was a sin to melt up the ground. He didn't know. He felt now as he had felt before - lost and full of great changing fears that he didn't understand" (151).
Melody and Big Mat approach the mills on their way back from near Pittsburgh. Mat says that the man he beat was “Dusty Butt” Jones and that he would kill any man who he caught “creepin” around Anna. Melody tries to stop Mat from talking about his problems with Anna and ends up echoing what Bo had said to him earlier. “Lots o’ guys round here jest starts out in a new way. It ain’t nothin’ to upset a man” (154). Sugar Mama had told Big Mat that Anna was with Dusty, but she had lied – Dusty had proved that to Mat and Mat had tried to kill him anyway. Mat says that maybe Melody can tell him something, and repeats the request then squeezes Melody’s injured hand to end his silence. “All right - all right – it be alright” Melody finally stammers.
Melody and Mat are suddenly aware of some danger at the mill and of whistles blowing, and an explosion from one of the furnaces raises a mushroom cloud and rocks their windshield. They drive across the town to the mill gates and everyone in town is moving toward the mill to see what has happened.
People wait at the gates to find out what has happened – the number four blast furnace had gone up. Melody sneaks in past the gate when the ambulance goes out, and asks Bo what happened. “‘Like a bottle of bad vinegar, he said. ‘Foamed over jest like vinegar’” (159). Bo is not yet able to give further details.
Part Five
Fourteen men die in the explosion, and of Melody’s crew only Chinatown and Bo survives. Chinatown’s eyes have been burned horribly and he is blind. Melody and Mat get a bigger house so that Chinatown can be with them. Melody searches for ways to connect with Chinatown, and they play the wishing game they had played in Kentucky. The narrative involves a series of snakes that become trees and other objects before they can harm Melody. Like in Kentucky, Chinatown pushes Melody to add red pop to the narrative. Chinatown craves red pop, and Melody goes out to get him some.
The explosion has helped the union cause, and there are signs everywhere. Melody goes to the bunkhouse where Bo is melting steel to make watch fops as he had jokingly assured Smothers he would do. When Melody returns with the red pop, Chinatown says it doesn’t taste right and Melody reflects that Chinatown cannot taste the color red.
Big Mat feels empty and Anna won’t sleep with him, so he walks the hills. He thinks about where they would be in the planting if they were back at home. Sometimes Melody accompanies him.
The attitude of the foreign workers toward the blacks is changing. Strangers scowl or throw rocks, and even Zanski hesitates to acknowledge them on the street before warning them of trouble around the next bend. Pushing on, they find a beaten Bo. A group had accused him of being a “stoolpigeon” spying in union meetings. He asks Big Mat and Melody to accompany him to the mill gates where he goes into the office, which makes them think he may be spying after all. The narrator suggests that for Mat, the twelve hour workday and the pay he receives are still so much better than what he knows as a sharecropper that he could not quite think of joining the union. As they leave the gates, Melody and Mat see a boxcar full of men running up the tracks to the mill. The new men are unfamiliar with the dangerous work and there are many accidents, but the work must continue because once a furnace looses its fire it has to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt.
“Somehow it seemed to the men from the red hills that the idea of flesh-and-blood striking was a crazy thing. The fire and flow of the metal seemed an eternal act which had grown beyond men’s control. It was not to be compared with crops that one man nursed to growth and ate at his own table. The nearness of a farmer to his farm was easily understood. But no man was close to steel. It was shipped across endless tracks to all the world. On the consignment slips were Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, rails for South America, tin for Africa, tool steel for Europe. This hard metal held up the new world. Some were shortsighted and thought they understood. Steel is born in the flames and sent out to live and grow old. It comes back to the flames and has a new birth. But no one man could calculate its beginning or end. It would end when the earth ended. It seemed deathless.” (180).
Union organizers try to reach out to the blacks, but their leaders have already been bought by the steel interests. Bo tells Melody and Mat that two black politicians who impress them use big words but don’t know much, and are being paid. Bo defends his spying on the unions by saying he has to save his job, and that he is the only black with micks working under him. Mat and Melody go home and try to stay out of the union fighting. Big Mat watches Anna closely, and when Melody is not with Chinatown he is with Big Mat. One night Chinatown has to go to the outhouse and when Anna gets up to help him Big Mat says to let him find it himself. He wanders helplessly awhile, and then Anna helps him. Coming back, he complains that there are rats at night and that Anna doesn’t hear them because she isn’t there – Melody is alert, but Big Mat had not been listening. Anna puts Chinatown’s hand on her breast to calm him and Mat tells her to move away from him and that he has to learn to make do for himself. Melody decides to get a woman to sleep with Chinatown.
Melody knocks on a door where some dice players are gathered to ask about finding a prostitute. They tell him that most have gone on toward Pittsburgh because there’s so little money in town with the union strike. There are still some prostitutes in Mex town but it’s dangerous to go there at night. One of the men lets Melody in on a secret – a place above a dry-goods shop where some of the town women were selling themselves at night.
Big Mat is walking far from home, carrying a boulder as has become his habit, when a sheriff and a driver spot him. The man pulls a gun and tells Mat to drop the boulder. He raises it above his head and then does so, casually. The driver recruits Big Mat as a deputy for half work at the mill and four extra dollars a day. On his way back from being sworn in as a deputy at the mill, Mat encounters some deputies and is surprised by the respect they grant him on finding that he is one of them. Mat returns home with a new feeling of power, and struts in front of Anna.
Melody has made plans for China to see one of the women above the dry-good store on Monday, when other men will be occupied with the union battle. At home on Monday, he rouses Chinatown’s interest by reminding him of how popular he used to be with the women and suggesting that a few of them had asked after him. He gets Chinatown to suggest that they go that night. Anna seems nervous and tries to dissuade them. Melody and Chinatown arrive at the place and it is clear from Melody’s conversation with the proprietress that Melody has made the arrangement and that no girls had been asking after him. Chinatown wants to leave but Rosie, Zanski’s daughter and the girl who had agreed to take Chinatown, insists that he lay down a moment to rest. She tells Melody that she still works at the lunch wagon and lots of girls are working as prostitutes at night to make ends meet. She tells him she still goes to Church every Sunday and then tells him that Chinatown should go to the Church, and about a blind preacher she knew of. She also tells him that another girl who works above the dry-goods store some nights lives with a blind man who will only calm down when she puts his hand on her breast. Melody demands to know who the woman is but Rosie doesn’t know her name. Melody gives her five dollars to watch over Chinatown and runs out to confront Anna.
Big Mat joins the deputies in beating up the strikers, and feels a tremendous sense of power. He remembers the riding boss and thinks of how the riding boss would have to look at him differently now. He wants Anna to know that he is a new man and a boss.
Melody gets to the cabin just as Mat does, and after Mat washes his hands and heads out to the outhouse he tells Anna that he knows her secret. He proposes that the two of them run off together where Big Mat can’t find them. As they argue and Anna warns him to be quiet he forgets to keep his voice low and calls out, “I’ll tell Big Mat” (220). Big Mat hears that and as the story starts to come out he hits her. She shows him a paper suitcase filled with nice clothing she has bought herself and says that she had planned to leave before he came home the next day. As he beats her with a leather belt and she says that he is not an Americano but only a peon, and that she will not be with a peon.
Big Mat leaves the house with Anna’s words echoing in his head. He meets the waiting troopers, who tell him that he is to go into the union house and start a fight, and that they will back him up. He rushes to the fight, wanting the violence to keep Anna’s words from the front of his consciousness. He knows that a peon is like a slave and he keeps telling himself that here there is no riding boss. There are men and women waiting quietly at the union meeting house. They have been warned of the attack and a boy is on the lookout at the window. Big Mat walks into the meeting house but is confused at first by the calmness inside. He stands awkwardly and finally approaches the desk, where a man hands him a slip of paper. He seems almost ready to sign it when a woman shouts that he is a low-down deputy and that he did not come to the meeting house to sign. That sets Big Mat off and he knocks the desk down, then beats his way through the crowd and leaves strangling an old Slav man by the throat. He pushes away the word peon with the thought that there is no riding boss and then that he is the riding boss. The mounted deputies are galloping around and Big Mat looks toward the mills and feels like God himself. He is thinking that Smothers was wrong when a pick axe handle rams into the back of his head. Big Mat looks at the young Slav who is killing him with the pick axe handle, repugnance in his face about what he has to do. “His vision faded. He was confused. It seemed to him that he had been through all of this once before. Only at that far time he had been the arm strong with hate” (233).
Later at the jail, the sheriff says it’s too bad about Big Mat. “He was game, all right, but crazier ‘n hell. That’s the thing ‘bout nigger deputies – they’re fightin’ the race was ‘stead of a labor strike. Always be like that, I guess, as long as they come from the South. There’ll be somebody to take his place, an’ that there’s one reason why the union ain’t going to win. They didn’t figure on the South when they started this here . . .” (234).
Melody and Chinatown are on a train headed toward Pittsburgh, and they happen to sit facing a blind soldier. The soldier asks for a cigarette and Chinatown gives it to him, and they talk. The soldier says he hears big guns a hundred miles away, and he’s referring to the sound of the mills. The soldier says, “Sounds like somethin’ big and important that a fella’s missing, don’t it?” and Chinatown nods. “Melody watched the nod. He looked at the two men closely. Their heads cocked to one side, listening for sounds that didn’t exist. They were twins” (237).
Criticism
Pinckney, Darryl. “Introduction.” Blood on the Forge. NY: New York Review Books, 2005 (1941).
Attaway born 1911 to a middle-class family, and came from Mississippi to Chicago at the age of five during the early part of the Great Migration. Richard Wright also comes from Mississippi to Chicago and writes in the Marxist literary climate of the 1930s. Attaway originally wanted to be a mechanic, but after reading Langston Hughes in highschool goes on to study at the university of Illinois. He has to drop out when his father dies, and Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) – the story of two white hobos in the American Northwest during the Depression - comes out of his experience as a hobo and itinerant worker. 1935 Federal Writers Project introduces him to Richard Wright and allows him to return to the University of Illinois for his degree. Let Me Breathe Thunder is the first time a black writer has written about white main characters since Paul Laurence Dunbar’s late 1800s commercial romances. Let Me Breathe Thunder and Blood on the Forge both “much influenced by the naturalism that had brought ethnic groups and the working class into American literature” (viii).