Blood on the Forge Page 2

  Though Blood on the Forge was published as the US entered World War II and blacks and whites were migrating from the South in search of defense industry jobs, something in its philosophical disposition looks back to Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), with its vagabond ex-servicemen who do not want to be strikebreakers, or even to the D. H. Lawrence of Aaron’s Rod (1922), in which every piece of North England grime is remembered as an insult. In spite of its themes, it is less overtly political than the novels Chester Himes would publish about blacks and unionism in the 1940s, as if Attaway’s labor story takes place too early to have any Communists in it. Attaway emptied his novel of the expected politics in order to reflect instead on the rituals of black life that cannot be transplanted to the new environment. He captures the beginnings of the most significant cultural change in twentieth-century black America, the shift from the rural South to the urban North.

  In his review of Attaway’s powerfully realistic but deeply fatalistic novel, young Ralph Ellison faulted his contemporary for not doing more with the folk feeling he drew on. “Conceptionally, Attaway grasped the destruction of the folk, but missed its rebirth at a higher level.” It was not enough to show destructive forces at work on black migrants, Ellison said; the black writer had a duty to relate the transformation in social consciousness of the black individual, an argument that, interestingly enough, made Ellison sound like an apologist for political propaganda. Ellison argued that Attaway’s failure to show the transcendence of his characters as representatives of the folk confined his work to the most limited naturalism.

  But Ellison failed to hear the lyricism in Attaway’s recitation of brutal particulars. It is Attaway’s style, stripped, bright, and cold, that makes memorable his recognition of the power of sex, and of Big Mat’s helpless fate. “Jest as well I was born a nigger. Got more misery than a white man could stand,” Big Mat says early on in his voice that is like the slow roll of a drum. As Blood on the Forge unfolds, Attaway concentrates what could be called the novel’s blues feeling in Big Mat. His brothers say of him more than once that he has never laughed in his life, just as the Mexican whores say of Chinatown that no one can resist laughing when he is around. Melody mediates between the two, interprets their feelings. However, by the end of the novel, his music, like Chinatown’s flashing smile and Big Mat’s strength, has run out. Misfortune is piled upon misfortune, but Attaway manages to convince us that some lives are like that, unlucky. Big Mat, believing himself cursed, unlucky in Hattie, unlucky in Anna—in a life gone so wrong only the blues can come in.

  —DARRYL PINCKNEY

  BLOOD ON THE FORGE

  For

  my sister Ruth

  PART ONE

  HE NEVER had a craving in him that he couldn’t slick away on his guitar. You have to be native to the red-clay hills of Kentucky to understand that. There the guitar players don’t bother with any fingering; they do it by running a knife blade up and down the stops. Most of the good slickers down where he was born would say that a thin blade made the most music. But he liked the heft of a good, heavy hog sticker. It took a born player to handle one of those. And maybe that’s why his mother changed his name to Melody when he got old enough for a name to mean something beside “Come get tit.”

  Nineteen-nineteen—early spring: the last time, there among the red-clay hills, he was to reach down his guitar. It was a hungry craving yanking at his vitals. That wasn’t unusual; share-cropping and being hungry went together. He had never thought about white pork, molasses and salt water cornbread as food anyhow. They were just something to take the wrinkles out of his stomach. Maybe thinking like that had something to do with his not growing up tall and hefty like his half brothers, Big Mat and Chinatown—that and making music when he should have been fighting over the little balls of fat left in the kettle.

  Chinatown was in the dust by the shack, playing mumblety-peg with the hog sticker. His back was flattened against a tin patent-medicine sign that covered the chinks in the cabin. Because the tin held the heat of the last sun he rubbed his back up and down and grinned. His gold tooth flashed. There had never been anything wrong with his teeth; he had just had a front one pulled to make space for the gold.

  Melody plopped down on the lopsided stoop and arranged his guitar. Chinatown looked out of the corners of his little slant eyes.

  “What blues you chordin’?”

  “Hungry blues.” And Melody plucked the thrown hog sticker out of the air.

  “Won’t be no more hungry blues come night.”

  Hattie came and stood in the doorway. She was Big Mat’s wife. The marks on her told that much. But although she was hardly bigger than Melody’s music box nobody could take the spunk out of her. She leaned against the doorjamb and rubbed one bare foot against the other.

  “I hear what you say, China.”

  “What you hear I say?”

  “That you goin’ out stealin’ come night.”

  “You hear wrong, woman. I say ain’t gonna be no more hungry blues, come night. An’ you know why?”

  “‘Cause we be doin’ ninety days on the road gang for your thievin’?”

  “Naw,” squealed Chinatown, “‘cause, come night, we all be sleepin’.” He laughed, and his gold tooth shone as he laughed, only you couldn’t call it laughter by his face. His slant eyes and the tight skin drawing the lips back off his teeth made laughing his natural look.

  “Maybe Mat bring somethin’ back.” Hattie sighed. “He gone over Moaningreen way to kill them ailin’ hogs for Mr Johnston.”

  “Maybe he git a whole hog,” said Chinatown. “They gonna die anyways.”

  “Mr Johnston ain’t givin’ niggers no well hog an’ he ain’t givin’ ’em no sick hog. He ain’t givin’ ’em no hog a-tall.” And with that Melody struck up a chord, running his knife the full length of the guitar. It was mellow, like the sound of hound dogs baying across a river.

  “Done scratched at the hills,

  But the ’taters refuse to grow. . . .

  Done scratched at the hills,

  But the ’taters refuse to grow. . . .

  Mister Bossman, Mister Bossman,

  Lemme mark in the book once mo’. . . .”

  There were more verses like that than any one man knew. And after each verse the refrain:

  “Hungry blues done got me listenin’ to my love one cry. . . .

  Put some vittles in my belly, or yo’ honey gonna lay down and die. . . .”

  He quit singing to just slick a little while. There was no need to think; his hand wouldn’t stop until it had found every minor chord in the box.

  “It ain’t no two ways about it,” breathed Hattie. “Blues sure is a help.”

  “Hungry blues ain’t nothin’,” he told her, never stopping. “It ain’t like you tryin’ to blues away a love cravin’ that git so mixed up with the music you can’t know which is which.”

  “Lawd, now!” she breathed.

  “Ain’t never hear tell of a creeper singin’ no love blues,” said Chinatown through his golden grin.

  “Ain’t never seen no creeper without razor marks on him somewhere, you mean,” said Hattie.

  “There ain’t no mark on me.”

  “Well, what you lay that to?”

  “Reckon I jest too slick to git caught.”

  “You jest got more space to cook up devilment than anybody else. A body ought to be ’shamed to lay round in the dust all day, lettin’ his two brothers go out in the fields and earn his somethin’-to-eat for him.”

  “I lazy, and they smart.” He grinned. “I lazy and hungry—they smart and hungry.” He helped his point with a bigger grin.

  Hattie did not know what to say. She fussed around with her feet. Then, snorting, she went into the shack. Chinatown winked at Melody.

  From the southwest came a flock of coots, flying high, straining forward like all water fowl. All day they had been passing overhead, curving north. It would not be long before the wild ducks and geese
would make the same passage. Chinatown looked up.

  “When coots come afore the duck tomorrow goin’ to bring bad luck.” Extending his hands, he sighted along an imaginary rifle. “Bop! Bop! Bop!” He settled back, satisfied with the number of coots he had killed in his mind.

  Hattie popped into the doorway. She had thought of the right answer for Chinatown. “It ain’t needin’ for none of us to be hungry, an’ you with a hunk of gold in your mouth.”

  Chinatown looked scared, and Hattie watched him with satisfaction. She knew he would rather die than part with that shiny tooth but she was out to plague him.

  “Maybe it ain’t worth nothin’,” he mumbled.

  “It worth a full belly.”

  He could not look at her eyes. His toes searched the dust.

  “I know what,” she said.

  “What?” mumbled Chinatown.

  “Tonight I talk to Big Mat, so he yank it outen your head and take it in to Madison.”

  Chinatown half rose. “No!” His voice went into falsetto and cracked. “I work in the bossman’s fields all season for that tooth.”

  Hattie backed. “Onliest time you stir since is to look at that gold in the glass.” She disappeared in the shack.

  He sat back against the tin. After a time he mumbled, “Ain’t no use in a man stirrin’ round and gettin’ all lathered up. He ain’t gittin’ no place.”

  He was talking to himself, but Hattie heard and called out, “Now what you tryin’ to say?”

  “Only seem like good sense to stay where you was in the first place and save yourself the trouble of comin’ back.”

  She came to the door again. “How the crop goin’ to get made?”

  “We jest niggers, makin’ the white man crop for him. Leave him make his own crop, then we don’t end up owin’ him money every season.”

  “Lawd, you never will be no good!” Hattie sighed. “Maybe you git straightened out if you gits a woman of your own to feed.”

  Melody entered the conversation in an old song:

  “Now the berry always sweeter on the other man’s bush. . . .

  What you reckon make that?”

  Chinatown guffawed. “Now that there the truth.”

  “Your poor dead maw musta had a conjure, to set a bag egg like you without spoilin’ the brook,” she said.

  “Better be careful not to say nothin’ ’bout Maw when Big Mat around,” Chinatown warned.

  “Sure said he’d belt you,” put in Melody.

  “An’ I ain’t never knowed Mat to grin when he say somethin’,” said Chinatown.

  “Mat know he in the wrong,” she scolded.

  “Forgit about it,” advised Melody.

  “I got cause to talk as much as I please.”

  “Jest forgit about it.”

  “Mat jest afeared I goin’ to talk about how come we ain’t got no mule and what the reason we ain’t got nothin’ to cook up in the house.”

  To cut Hattie off Melody started up another spell of the blues. Maw hadn’t been in the ground but about four weeks. Neither of them wanted to hear any talk about her or that mule. Talk brought back the homemade burial box, the light rain falling and the thud of falling clods still ringing in their ears as they went homeward across the pastures, before sunup Maw out pushing that one-mule plow, Chinatown sitting around in the dust, Melody dodging the fields for his guitar. They thought of it now. She had dropped dead between the gaping handles of the plow. The lines had been double looped under her arms, so she was dragged through the damp, rocky clay by a mule trained never to balk in the middle of a row. The mule dragged her in. The rocks in the red hills are sharp. She didn’t look like their maw any more. Hattie went to work on the body with yellow hogfat soap. Chinatown and Melody sat against the house and cried. Big Mat went away for a long time. He came back hog wild and he took a piece of flint rock and tore the life out of that mule, so that even the hide wasn’t fit to sell.

  Melody had fallen out on the ground and vomited and for three days afterward he couldn’t hold food on his stomach. The sight of blood always acted on him like that.

  Four weeks had stopped them from wailing. It was better for her to be in heaven, was Hattie’s word on their maw, than making a crop for Mr Johnston. . . . Still, you couldn’t stop her from working. If that mule went to the same place she did she probably started in right away to plow for God.

  Mr Johnston said that they could not have any more food credit. He claimed their share of the crop for the next two years in payment for his mule. He didn’t say where the crop was coming from when there was no animal to plow with. He didn’t say how they were going to eat without food credit. All they could do was to wait for him to change his mind.

  Hattie had kept at Big Mat, driving him crazy with her talk, blaming him for everything. One day it had taken both Chinatown and Melody to keep him from lighting into her with the butt end of a hoe. But he swore he’d belt her if she even mentioned Maw again.

  Melody sang softer and softer. Soon he was just singing for himself. Going onto verse fifty, or there-about, he got weary and barely hit the strings. He looked away over the rolling country to the place where the sun had about given up fighting the dark hills. Most of the country beyond Vagermound Common was bunched with crab-apple trees, posing crookedly, like tired old Negroes against the sky. Big Mat was going to come walking out of those hills, over the Vagermound Common, down the red, packed road that wound past their door. He was going to have a greasy sack over his shoulders, Melody hoped. To keep from hoping too hard about that sack he made out to play the wish game with Chinatown.

  “China,” he half sang, “you know where I wish I was now?”

  Chinatown hunched forward in the dust. He liked the wishing game. They had played at it all their lives, most times wishing they were at the grand places pictured in the old newspapers that livened the walls of the shack.

  ‘Where at?” He grinned eagerly.

  “Me—me,” pondered Melody, “me—I wish I was in town. That’s it—smack in town—and it’s a Saturday noontime.”

  “What you be doin’?”

  “Jest standin’—all made out in a white-checkered vest and a ice-cream suit, and you can’t hardly see the vest for a gold watch chain. I got on shoes, too—yeller shoes with dimes in the toes. Man, man!”

  “The gals is passing by. . . .” Chinatown tried to help.

  “Naw, that ain’t till evenin’. Now I aimin’ to shoot some pool.”

  “You can’t shoot no pool.”

  “But I wish I can,” said Melody.

  “Ain’t you aimin’ to make no music?”

  “Jest aimin’ to shoot some pool,” he told him. “Course, I got my guitar with me, jest in case. But I’m feelin’ too good to make my guitar cry.”

  “Now ain’t that awful you can’t make no music, and you feelin’ good?” sympathized Chinatown.

  “It don’t make no never mind, ’cause my box is shinin’ with silver, and the stops all covered with mother-of-pearl. An’ everybody see me say that must be Mr Melody. They say howdy to Mr Dressin’-man Melody.”

  Hattie was in the doorway again.

  “Stuff!” she snorted, but she was listening hard.

  “What you do, come night?” asked Chinatown.

  Melody thought hard and struck a long chord to make his thoughts swell with the music.

  “Come night—come night . . . Well, I guess I spark around the gals and drink a little corn. Maybe I’m on a church picnic. The gal and me has got our bellies full and slipped away in the bushes at the edge of the river. Had the corn in my pocket all the time.”

  Chinatown had a pucker around his slant eyes.

  “Goin’ to drink anythin’ but corn?” he asked hopefully.

  Chinatown wanted him to put a bottle of red pop into the story. Chinatown lived on red pop whenever they were in Masonville. He had loved it from the first bottle given him by a white man who thought it would be funny to see a little slant-eyed p
ickaninny drink red pop. When asked how he liked it Chinatown had told the man:

  “Taste kinda like your foots is ’sleep.”

  He was right.

  “I say you goin’ to drink anythin’ but corn?” repeated Chinatown.

  “Jest corn.” Then, seeing how Chinatown was caught in the story, he added: “Maybe I mix it with a little red pop though.”

  “That make it good.” Chinatown grinned.

  It was deep dusk.

  “Wish night gone and real night come on.” Hattie sighed. “Guess I light the rag for Big Mat.” Melody looked up, caught by the rhythm of her words. She went in to light the scrap in a dish of black tallow. The kerosene had been gone a long time.

  Chinatown took an old quid out of his pocket. He wrapped it in a dried corn husk and tied the cigar-shaped mass with Johnson grass.

  “Smoke always spoil my feelin’ for eatin’,” he said. He called to Hattie: “Hand me out a lighted stick.”

  “What you want a fire stick for?” she called back.

  “Gonna set the house on fire.” He laughed.

  Grumbling, she brought a glowing twig.

  “Ain’t but one place you coulda got any tobacco,” she said. “You done found one of Mat’s hunks o’ chewin’ tobacco and crumpled it up.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Mat take the hide off you.”

  “What for? He chewed this piece already about ten times.”

  “Well, can’t say I hold no blame. . . . What I wouldn’t give for a pinch of snuff under the lip!”

  “Wish night gone and real night come on,” Melody repeated. “That sound like the blues, Hattie.”

  “Too bad you didn’t bring some wish snuff back with you from Wish Town,” was her answer.

  “Night creep up like a old woman,” Melody said softly to himself. “Can’t see her—can’t hear her. She jest creep up when your back turned.”