While sharecropping is not slavery, one early scene shows Big Mat butchering a handful of sick hogs only to learn that his labor will simply count against his insurmountable debt, his only tangible payment coming in the form of hog guts with which he can make chitterlings. Both the landowner and his lackey, the Riding Boss, see Big Mat in particular as exemplifying an animalistic combination of physical strength and quiet obeisance.

Kentucky’s system of debt peonage operated largely along the same racial lines as the chattel slavery in place fifty years earlier, and Attaway makes the same comparisons between his protagonists and farm animals-in this case mules and hogs-as Toni Morrison does in Beloved. The three Moss brothers-Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody-are sharecroppers who finish each year in debt to the local landowner who, not coincidentally, also keeps track of what they owe and what they earn. Although the two are contemporaneous critiques of working conditions, reading Attaway’s brutal, candid depiction of steelmaking is nothing like watching Charlie Chaplin get pulled into the gears of a cartoonish machine in Modern Times (1936).īlood on the Forge is primarily set along the banks of the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh, but opens in Kentucky in 1919. Attaway’s book provides a realistic view of life in an early-twentieth-century steel town, which means racial conflict, workers getting “tagged” by liquid-hot steel, and a woman named Sugar Mama luring her own niece up from Mexico to work as a prostitute.

The naturalism of Blood on the Forge, unlike “Day-O,” does nothing to mask the violent content implied by the book’s title. A decade earlier, in 1941, Attaway had authored Blood on the Forge, a novel about three brothers who leave sharecropping in Kentucky to become Pennsylvania steel mill workers as part of the Great Migration. The lyrics to “Day-O” were written, in part, by Belafonte’s friend William Attaway. The song’s form masks its content, so it doesn’t sound like a polemic. As dawn breaks, the workers just want to go home to rest. The bunches of bananas loaded onto ships hide tarantulas. If you can get past the calypso rhythm and focus on the lyrics, you realize that it is a song about exhausted dock workers finishing an overnight shift. “Day-O,” recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956, is one of those songs that sounds cheerful, as long as you don’t listen too carefully.

Blood on the forge by william attaway