Things get temporal, cultural, situational. The violence is not diminished, however, just skewed. The racism is less overt, less definitive. This book starts in a very Jim Crow Kentucky but soon finds it way to Pittsburgh, where I live. Where the mule gone at? He only a voice in the pature land.Ī blinded man wants a red pop, but he can't taste the red anymore. There ain't no crab-apple trees squat in the hills, no more land to hoe in the red-hot sun - white the same as black. There's labor and strife and music but blues here:Īt night the hills ain't red no more. He wrote this novel, his last of just two, before Day-O. William Attaway co-wrote The Banana Boat Song and looking in the Calypso singer's eyes you might feel the resentment behind the smile and the maracas. Work all night on a drink of rum/Stack banana 'til de mornin' come/Come, mister tally man, tally me banana/Daylight come and me wan' go home/A beautiful bunch o' ripe banana/Hide the deadly black tarantula/Daylight come and me wan' go home. You could be forgiven for not hearing the alternating words. Hands on your waist from behind your hands around the waist in front. A party, a reception, a wedding after sufficient drink. He died in Los Angeles while working on a script.

Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, 'Let Me Breathe Thunder' (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with 'Blood on the Forge' (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North.Īttaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte.Ī resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life.

He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South.Īttaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write.

Blood on the forge by william attaway