-
William A. Attaway
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
WilliaM a. attaWay (november 19, 1911–June 17, 1986) richard yarborough William Attaway’s literary reputation rests upon two novels—Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) and Blood on the Forge (1941)—that establish him as an exceedingly important black fictive voice of his generation. Most notably, his depiction in Blood on the Forge of the tragic physical and spiritual toll taken by the Northern industrial mills on black laborers from the South remains one of the most vivid and compelling dramatizations of the underside of the Great Migration in U.S. literature. In addition, even though he never published another novel in the wake of this magnificent accomplishment, Attaway did not, in fact, give up creative writing; rather, he embarked upon a long and fruitful career in television, music, and film. Neither of his novels is set in Chicago and he spent relatively little of his adulthood in that city. Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand Attaway as very much a product of the rich creative outpouring termed the “Black Chicago Renaissance” and to attend to the ways in which his fiction reflects the literary and ideological impulses informing the work of other African American artists identified with Chicago of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, on November 19, 1911, William Alexander Attaway was raised in a family of no mean distinction. His father, William A. Attaway, was a physician, an entrepreneur, and a leader in the region’s black community. After earning his medical degree at Meharry in 1902 and setting up a successful practice, Dr. Attaway launched a number of business initiatives that gained him considerable notoriety. In 1906 he assumed the presidency of a black savings bank not far from Indianola, Mississippi. Then, two years later, he headed the formation of a firm that eventually became the Mississippi Life Insurance Company, the first such venture owned and operated by African Americans. In an article in the Daily Worker in 1939, Attaway comments on the motivation behind his family’s move from Mississippi to Chicago: “My father . . . had a notion that Negro kids brought up in the South unconsciously accept the whites’ estimate of them, and they never get to know what it is to be a human among humans. He brought us north hoping we wouldn’t absorb these false WilliaM a. attaWay • 31 Southern ideas.”1 Although that explanation is no doubt accurate, there are also indications that Dr. Attaway had occasionally run afoul of powerful white interests in Mississippi because of both his commercial ambitions and his political views. Accordingly, his decision to leave the South may well have been driven by a range of concerns, some more pressing than others. Regardless, probably around 1918, Attaway’s father relocated the family to Chicago, where he built a new medical practice and his wife, Florence Perry Attaway, took a position as a school teacher.2 In short order, the Attaways established themselves as important members of the local black elite. Just how quickly Dr. Attaway rose to a position of prominence was apparent during the racial unrest in the city in July of 1919. As reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune, he was one of a handful of “representative business and professional men” who issued a public statement urging African Americans “to be the first to cease all acts of violence,” even if provoked by white attacks. He articulated his views on the matter this way: “Our policy ought to be to do everything we can to stop the rioting, and not depend upon reprisals and violence to right any wrongs.”3 Moreover, in the early 1920s he was a member of the Chicago Business League and a group called “the Mississippi club,” the purpose of which was to unify and advance the community of African American transplants from that state. On her own part, Mrs. Attaway was also a significant figure in black Chicago, serving around this time as an officer of a settlement organization in the city. Even the two Attaway daughters, Florence and Ruth, received notice in the Chicago Defender for their social activities. Attaway’s parents were as ambitious in the goals that they set for their three children as they were in their own lives, and they hoped that their son would enter a profession that might solidify a place for him in the black bourgeoisie. Attaway, however, was pulled in other directions. On the one hand, he was fascinated with machines, and he attended Tilden Tech High School...