The 1941 novel Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, tells the unhappy story of three African-American brothers – Melody, Big Matt, and “Chinatown” – who flee prejudice and their gritty, poverty-stricken life as Kentucky sharecroppers to work in the steel mills near Pittsburgh.  The time is during or just after World War One, and the place is apparently Homestead or somewhere else up the Monongahela. 

            Life in Western Pennsylvania, as it turns out, isn’t much better than in Kentucky. The harsh industrial landscapes are shocking and repellant to the brothers, who despite their poverty have been used to the pleasures of rural living. Work conditions on the open hearth, meanwhile, are brutal, and physical danger lurks at every turn.  On top of all this the brothers have unwittingly been recruited as potential strike breakers, and they receive a hostile reception from the Eastern European immigrants who have been lobbying for better work conditions and know why the Blacks have been recruited.  (The Hungarians in this story are the bad guys.  The Irish, on the other hand, aren’t so bad.)

            The novelist depicts the brothers as being corrupted, and ultimately ruined, by their migration to the urban north and their work in industrial labor.  All three eventually succumb: Melody to jealousy surrounding an unavailable brothel temptress, Big Matt to retributive violence against the striking Slavs, and Chinatown to a catastrophic work accident. 

            Chinatown, indeed, is blinded in a sudden explosion of a blast furnace: “The steel workers understood the way of the accident. A shelf of hot metal had built itself high up in the faulty furnace.  When that shelf had broken the force of its fall had been explosive.  The upward rush of the blast had blown the entire top off the furnace.  Tons of stock had been thrown into the air.  That was why fourteen men had had to die….  It might have been better if the list of dead had run to fifteen.  Chinatown’s eyes were gone….” 

            In the end Melody escorts his blind sibling out of the mill town and down to the presumably greener pastures of Pittsburgh and “the strip, a place where rent was nearly free and guys who knew how to make out would show them the ropes.”  Facilitating this escape is a lump sum, presumably (given the year) of workers’ compensation: “Melody had a check for two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, but that did not seem like big money now.  It was the little price that had been paid for Chinatown’s eyes.”