We know for certain that Attaway was the son of a successful doctor who moved from Mississippi to Chicago when he was age five (some sources say six). Yet there are ample inconsistencies, contradictions, and elisions, so much so that the architecture of his experiences and personality persists as an elusive subject. A plethora of personal details about Attaway have been unearthed by several scholars, especially Richard Yarborough. He now seems like a promising star quarterback of the literary left’s Great Depression generation who was puzzlingly cut from the team. An Elusive SubjectĪn aura of mystery clings to the life of William Alexander Attaway (1911–86). Some passages may even provide glimpses of a shadow self. The characters and events grew partly out of field research and interviews, but also from the novelist’s personal circumstances, radical commitments, and literary sensibility. In five scintillating parts, the novel follows the lives of three African-American sharecroppers, the Moss brothers, who are uprooted from rural Kentucky and hurled into the industrial inferno of Western Pennsylvania.Īs with all literature, the landscape of Blood on the Forge expresses an interplay between the author’s biography and imagination. Written in an audacious and colorful style, at times more expressionistic than realistic, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge is a masterclass in how novels can be an alternative archive, a conduit for the preservation, transmission, and elucidation of the experience of oppressed people. Today, in a polarized era of anti–Black Lives Matter backlash and a union movement struggling to be reborn, it’s hard to think of another work of imaginative literature that reminds us so vividly of the deep relationship between racism and class oppression.
Failing to recognize common class interests, African-American and Euro-American workers were at each other’s throats. Eight decades ago, a thirty-year-old African-American Communist writer published a bold and alarming dramatization of the social costs of capitalism and racism at the time of the Great Steel Strike in 1919. History’s shadow can be longer than one might think.
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