Mules Became Steam Became Code: On William Attaway's "Blood on the Forge"

William Attaway | Blood on the Forge | Doubleday, NYRB Classics | 1941, 2005 | 264 Pages

“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. 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. The bunches of bananas loaded onto ships hide tarantulas. As dawn breaks, the workers just want to go home to rest. The song’s form masks its content, so it doesn’t sound like a polemic. 

The lyrics to “Day-O” were written, in part, by Belafonte’s friend William Attaway. 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 naturalism of Blood on the Forge, unlike “Day-O,” does nothing to mask the violent content implied by the book’s title. 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. 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).

Blood on the Forge is primarily set along the banks of the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh, but opens in Kentucky in 1919. 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. 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. 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. 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. The Moss brothers are working for literal scraps, so when a recruiter from the industrial North comes calling with ten-dollar bills and stories of a land free from lynchings, the brothers end up “squatted on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for market.” (Attaway, 38)

After the initial shock of replacing the red hills of Kentucky with railroads, smoke stacks, and white coworkers, the Moss brothers learn that they have also traded being compared to animals for being compared to machines. The new comparison is not favorable:

What do we count for against machines that lift tons easy as a guy takes a spoonful of gravy to his mouth? The magnets, traveling cranes and steam shovels that do the loading and unloading—in a week they handle piles of stuff that would keep a crew of a thousand guys busy for months. … What does that make a man? (Attaway, 56)

What the brothers don’t realize until much later is that they, as workers, have also become much further separated from their employer. The Kentucky landowner was a petty tyrant, but Big Mat could at least speak with him. In Pennsylvania, there are “bosses” that manage small groups of men working in the steel mills, but Andrew Carnegie’s name is never spoken. The gap between employer and employee has become so great that both figures are effectively invisible to each other. 

In Kentucky, without money, the Moss brothers relied on religion, music, and daydreaming to take the edge off their perpetual hunger. In Pennsylvania, dehumanized by the sheer scale of the machines they work beneath, the brothers turn to whisky, gambling, and prostitutes for salvation, and finish each week penniless. It is easy to see Blood on the Forge as a novel with a before-and-after structure, in which moving North does not alleviate the brothers’ poverty and oppression; reading the book today, it is impossible to ignore the fact that we are living through a third chapter of their story. Moving from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, the Moss brothers traded mules for steam shovels, and a local landowner for distant shareholders. Few people today work with either mules or steam shovels, but the alienation of labor that Attaway illustrates through the story of the Moss brothers continues. 

The critique of labor conditions today is not just the purview of novelists and filmmakers, but also tech experts, like New York Times columnist Kevin Roose. The subtitle of Roose’s recent book Futureproof is “9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation,” and reading his critique of AI, it is not difficult to see how the Moss brothers of the present are working not for either a landowner or Andrew Carnegie, but for apps that notify them when there is work to be done. Mules became steam shovels became code. In the interviews he conducted for the book, Roose writes, “I listened to the complaints of Uber and Lyft drivers who had been lured by the promise of flexible employment, but then found themselves suffering under the thumb of a draconian algorithm that nudged them to work longer hours, punished them for taking breaks, and constantly manipulated their pay.” (Roose, xvii) At least Big Mat had the option of losing his temper and punching the Riding Boss in the face. How do you break the jaw of an algorithm? 

Of course, Big Mat could only punch his employer in Kentucky; he lost that option when he moved North and transitioned from agriculture to industry. Andrew Carnegie’s invisibility is perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Blood on the Forge. By focusing on the gritty, personal lives of the Moss brothers, the Mexican prostitutes who rely on the mill workers, and the Slavic immigrants whose talk of unionization spurs the arrival of more boxcars filled with African American men from the South, Attaway allows his readers to overlook the fact that each of those groups is being pitted against the others by actors who remain off stage. When European mill workers initiate a strike, thuggish deputies are brought in to crush organization efforts, but the reader never sees management call in strikebreakers. What we see is the view Big Mat takes of his own labor: 

...he knew he would not join the union. For a man who had so lately worked from dawn to dark in the fields twelve hours and the long shift were not killing. For a man who had ended each year in debt any wage at all was a wonderful thing. For a man who had known no personal liberties even the iron hand of the mills was an advancement. (Attaway, 176)

Big Mat’s thinking is made to feel inevitable, rather than constructed. The racial, ethnic, and gender-based antagonism running through the novel feels like simply “the way things are.” Blood on the Forge paints a clear picture of racism and exploitation, but it is harder to see the root causes of those problems, because the causes get no lines of dialogue. Of course, neither will the algorithm that notifies a delivery driver of a route change, so perhaps the fact that Andrew Carnegie remains invisible throughout the book is less a flaw than a foreshadowing. 

There is, of course, a point at which the exploitation of labor leads to the possibility of unionization, striking, and even violence. At the outset of the book, while Big Mat slaughters hogs, the landowner idly explains his preference for African American sharecroppers, who he sees as more reliable and docile. He says, “[they] ain’t bothered with the itch; they knows how to make it the best way they kin and they don’t kick none.” As he’s speaking, “the hog suddenly started its final death struggles. It threshed about on the chain, throwing blood in a wide circle. Mr Johnston jumped back. Big Mat grabbed hold of the animal’s ears and held the big body steady.” Noticing Mr. Johnston’s fear, Mat reassures him by saying, “They don’t jump till they ‘most dead,” and Mr. Johnston laughs, not realizing that Mat might not be referring to the hogs. (Attaway, 15)