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.
The genesis of Attaway’s hobo novella lies in his adventures on the road and rails during the Great Depression. After two years of college, Attaway dropped out and hopped a freight headed west with forty dollars in his pocket. This was the early 1930s, when desperate men, women, and children swelled the ranks of the itinerant labor force. Once he reached San Francisco, he realized he was too broke to follow his dream of traveling to the Far East, so he got a job as a stevedore. Lured once again by the romance of the road, he followed the crops up through the western states, stopping for a few months at a farm in Kansas and again with a Japanese family back in San Francisco. “I had a hard job making it,” Attaway reminisced to the Daily Worker in June 1939, “Going over the mountains in an empty [refrigerator car] I lost all sensation in my fingers for almost two years.” Riding the rails as an itinerant laborer radicalized Attaway, and he worked as a union organizer upon joining his sister Ruth in Harlem in 1933. After struggling to find a job in the depth of the Depression, Attaway hit the road again, this time as an actor in Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s play “You Can’t Take It With You.”
These experiences—as hobo, activist, and actor—provided rich material for Attaway’s literary imagination. He wrote Let Me Breathe Thunder while on tour with the play, and its theatrical qualities reflect the context of its creation. The story draws from Attaway’s hobo experience, yet its main characters, Step and Ed, are white. These hard-boiled hoboes ride the rails in search of a good time and an occasional job. On a lark, they take a runaway Mexican child named Hi Boy under their wings. While Attaway flirts with the devil-may-care freedom of the hobo life, he makes it clear that the road is not a fit environment for a child, and he exposes Step and Ed’s desperate loneliness beneath their raucous revelry. The threesome settles into a more domestic routine when they stop to work for a few months at an apple farm in Washington’s Yakima Valley, owned by a kindly, father figure named Sampson. When they tire of this wholesome, familial environment, Step and Ed visit a nearby roadhouse owned by the most fascinating characters in the novella, a black female entrepreneur, Mag, and her partner, Cooper. Ultimately, the womanizing, hedonist Step loses his chance at redemption when he brings Sampson’s teen-aged daughter to the roadhouse and seduces her, and they flee to the rails once more.
Published in 1939, Let Me Breathe Thunder received positive reviews in both the mainstream and radical press. As Milton Meltzer proclaimed in the Daily Worker: “When William Attaway’s first novel landed on the desks of the critics the other day they got excited. From left to right the reviews are alive with paragraphs punched out enthusiastically.” Attaway’s novel may have appealed to critics in and out of the literary Left because it embedded radical themes—anti-Capitalism, anti-lynching, and even interracial sex—within the framework of a more conventional masculine road narrative. As Stanley Young of the New York Times put it: “His tough and tender story of two young box-car wanderers and their love for a little Mexican waif who rides the reefers with them has some of the emotional quality and force of the familiar relationship of George and Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ We see two rootless men faced by hard reality yet still susceptible to dreams and affection.” Despite these favorable reviews, the novella did not sell well, and it has received little attention from scholars. This critical neglect is perhaps due to the nature of present-day critical categories, which implicitly define African American literature as literature by and about black people. What does one do with a book written by a black writer with white protagonists? A book that resembles Of Mice and Men more so than Native Son?
Stanley Young wasn’t the only critic to mention the resemblance between Attaway’s debut novella and Steinbeck’s best-seller. Other critics at the time noticed the parallel, as have a handful of scholars who make passing reference to Attaway’s first book in their surveys of African American literature. Yet no one has compared the two in depth, which is crucial to understanding Attaway’s take on the intersections of race and class, and his effort to bridge radical anti-racism and American populism. Attaway self-consciously revises Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men to complicate the image of the populist collective—in this case the hobo community—that was so appealing in the 1930s. Attaway suggests the radically egalitarian potential of the hobo subculture, yet also exposes its racist shadow side.
In both novellas, the outsider status of the white characters allows them to cross racial boundaries. In Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George expand their vision of the “dream farm” to include Candy, the aging and crippled “swamper,” and Crooks, the “Negro stable buck” with a disfigured back. Yet Crooks does not enter into the community as an equal, but rather offers to “work for nothing—just [my] keep.” Moreover, Steinbeck avoids the thorny issue of miscegenation by limiting his interracial community to men. When Curley’s wife enters the scene, she silences the newfound friends by threatening to accuse Crooks of rape. Her threat of lynching disempowers and marginalizes the interracial collective.
Attaway offers a more radical interracial vision by directly confronting the hot-button issue of miscegenation. Like Steinbeck, he depicts the hobo subculture as radically egalitarian due to the outsider status of poor, rootless whites. According to the black hobo that appears briefly in Attaway’s story, “Guys on the road ain’t got prejudice like other folks.” Yet this hobo is a far cry from the physically weak, guarded Crooks. Rather, he asserts his racial equality in sexual terms, bragging about his sexual encounter with a white woman: “‘there was a yeller-haired girl in the empty with a bunch of us. Some of them gave her money. She let me love her up all the way in to Chi for a piece of cake. […] Black or white, it’s all the same on the road.’” In the boxcar, the black hobo can break America’s most powerful racial taboo, its number one justification for lynching.
While this boxcar moment offers a vision of racial equality among the down-and-out, a subsequent lynching scene suggests that the egalitarian hobo collective is as transient as its members. While Step is unfazed by the anonymous black hobo’s story of his sexual encounter with a white prostitute, he reacts violently to the notion of Cooper, the black owner of the roadhouse, having sex with Sampson’s white daughter, and joins a lynch mob in pursuit of his old friend. What explains Step’s contradictory behavior? First, class status and sexuality mediate each woman’s claim to whiteness: perhaps the miscegenation taboo applies to the farmer’s daughter and not to the prostitute. More importantly, Attaway warns that without political consciousness, it is impossible for someone like Step to differentiate between radical and reactionary collectivism.
While Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men enjoys enduring popularity as novel, play, and film, Attaway’s novella has slipped into obscurity. It was reprinted several more times—in London in 1940; in Copenhagen (in Danish) in 1943; under the title Tough Kid in 1952 and ‘55, and a final version under the original title in 1969. In 1960, the New York Times reported that Herbert Kline was working on a film adaptation of Let Me Breathe Thunder in Mexico, but the film was never made. Recovering Attaway’s hobo narrative restores the radical edge to a popular Depression-era icon. His story draws parallels between the experiences of white hoboes and racial minorities, yet ultimately warns readers of the powerful allure of the Jim Crow lynch myth, its geographical reach, and its fundamental hypocrisy.
by Erin Royston Battat
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Attaway’s novella was published by Lion Books in 1957 as Tough Kid. The racy images and titillating tagline, “two bums—and the woman they spoiled,” obscure the novel’s engagement with important issues of race and poverty.