William Attaway’s Hobo Novel

“Day O! Day O! Daylight come and me wanna go home.” Most Americans would immediately recognize Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song,” with its rhyming, rhythmic language and the irresistible calypso beat. “Come Mr. Tally man tally me banana…” Yet the creative genius behind the popular Jamaican singer is little known beyond a small academic circle. A close friend of Belafonte, African American writer William Attaway wrote the lyrics to this classic and others, compiled in his Calypso Song Book of 1957. “Day O is based on the traditional work songs of the gangs who load the banana boats in the harbor at Trinidad,” Attaway explains in the liner notes of Belafonte’s 1956 album Calypso. “The men come to work with the evening star and continue through the night. They long for daybreak when they will be able to return to their homes. All their wishful thinking is expressed in the lead singer’s plaintive cry: ‘Day O, Day O…. The lonely men and the cry in the night spill overtones of symbolism which are universal.” Attaway spent a long and varied career giving voice, in a range of literary and popular genres, to “the lonely men” whose labor puts food on our tables and keeps our industries running. He is best known for his 1941 novel Blood on the Forge, which chronicles the African American Great Migration and labor strife in the Pennsylvania steel mills.But perhaps Attaway’s most powerful expression of the loneliness of the agricultural worker is his first novella—out of print and neglected by scholars—a hobo narrative called Let Me Breathe Thunder.

Attaway’s interest in the poor and outcast began not with his own experience of poverty, but with his youthful rejection of bourgeois values that prompted him to follow an unconventional path. Attaway was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1911, and migrated as a child to Chicago. His father, a physician, and his mother, a teacher, desired better opportunities for their children outside of the Jim Crow South, and encouraged their son to pursue a career in medicine. While his older sister, Ruth, met their parents’ expectations by studying hard and becoming a successful Broadway actress, William bristled under the constraints of his middle-class upbringing. He frequently skipped classes during high school, and fared little better at the University of Illinois—except for his course in creative writing.