Chinatown responds, “What was that?” (236). The soldier bids him, “Listen” (236). The soldier says to Chinatown, “There’s one thing I couldn’t shut out” (Attaway 236). The loudest strain comes through at the end of the story as a train carries Melody Moss away from the Homestead steel mills. He sits opposite his brother, Chinatown Moss, and watches him talk with a soldier. Their older brother, Big Mat Moss, is gone. That melancholy rhythm echoes throughout William Atwell’s novel, Blood on the Forge. The music swells up in bodies cast in shades of blue and yellow it is mournful, yearning, and melodic, its rhythm incessant. It carries the piano player from the bar, to the street, and finally to his bed, where he dreams about that melody some more.
“Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.” The speaker, an unidentified spectator in Langston Hughes’s landmark poem, “The Weary Blues,” watches a Black musician wring love and sorrow from a piano in a Harlem bar. “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1925) In the process, Paine explores one of Pittsburgh’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement and how it reveals some of the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of our region’s heritage, offering an understanding of Black life in the mills and the industrialized communities that surrounded them.īy Dr. Paine, our site management coordinator and interpretive specialist, introduces us to William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, a 1941 novel primarily set in Homestead in 1919 that connects us with the lives of characters uprooted by the Great Migration. Student Programs at the Carrie Blast FurnacesĪ Literary Look at William Attaway’s Blood on the ForgeĪ Literary Look is an occasional series that features recommended reads from the Rivers of Steel staff.
Student Programs on the Explorer Riverboat.Birdwatching Cruise with the National Aviary.Sustainability Tour of the Carrie Furnaces with the Green Building Alliance.People in Industry-The Art of Jeannie McGuire.Arts & Grounds Tour of the Carrie Blast Furnaces.Industrial Tour of the Carrie Blast Furnaces.
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